
COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



v. 



CHAFF AND WHEAT 



A FEW GENTLE FLAILINGS 



BY 

FRANCIS P. DONNELLY, S.J. 

AUTHOR OF "MUSTARD SEED," "WATCHING AN HOUR," 
"HEART OF THE gospel/' ETC. 




NEW YORK 

P. J. KENEDY & SONS 
1915 




3mprimt potest : 

ANTONIUS MAAS, S.J. 
Praepo situs Prov. Marylandiae — Neo-Eboracensis 

Mif)il otistat: 

REMIGIUS LAFORT, S.T.D., 

Censor 

Jfmprimatur : 

^JOANNES CARDINALIS FARLEY 

Archiepiscopus Neo-Eboracensis 

Die 25, Oct., 1915 




COPTBIGHT, 1915, 

By P. J. Kenedy & SoNa 



©CI.A418348 



Dear Friends: 

The papers here printed have enjoyed the 
hospitality of the columns of America. It was 
there that Mustard Seed met first with many 
indulgent friends, who grew more numerous 
and more charitable when Mustard Seed ap- 
peared in book-form and was generously 
welcomed. If this companion volume, Chaff 
and Wheat, receives a fraction of such welcome 
and seems in the smallest way to deserve it, 
then there is one who will be very happy and 
very grateful to Heaven for his friends. 

Beneath the light chaff, dear friends, you 
will find, we may hope, much good, wholesome 
wheat. The threshing and winnowing was 
meant to be ever so gentle, but should a 
sharper stroke of the flail now and again come 
your way, be sure that it was aimed not at you 
but at that unpalatable outer casing which 
hides from our full appreciation and enjoyment 
the sweet, golden yield every one knows to be 
yours. 

F. P. D., S.J. 

St. Andrew-on-Hudson 
Poughkeepsie, N. Y. 
Our Lady's Birthday, 1915. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I Know Just How You Feel 1 

All for the Best * . 7 

Passing It Along 13 

Once upon a Time 21 

"You Shall," "I Won't." 27 

To Rage or Not to Rage 33 

The Dogmatist 39 

Simplifying Life 45 

That Blessed Word, Automatic 51 

This Vale of Sunny Shadows 57 

Harping on One String 63 

euphemia and the euphemists 69 

Will You Give Up? . . . . 75 

The Short Way Around 81 

Chivalry Still Passing 87 

Antipathy and Sympathy 93 

Are You Doing It Yourself? 99 

If I Were You 107 

Saints Made While You Wait 115 

Carrying His Point 121 

Does It Pay? 127 

Agreeing to Differ 133 

Micrometer or Megaphone? Which? .... 139 

Tremendousness of Trifles 145 

Broad or Narrow? 151 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Make-Ups 159 

Comparisons Are — 163 

Saving Up 169 

A Voracious Monster 175 

What Are Curmudgeons? 181 

" I Have Been Dead " 187 

The Carving out of a Character 193 

Because! 203 

How to Tell a Jesuit: One Way 209 

How to Tell a Jesuit: Another Way .... 215 

Patriotism of Peace 223 

The Breaking Point 233 

Fads and Faddists 241 

How Fads Grow 251 

How Fads Go 259 



I KNOW JUST HOW YOU FEEL 



I KNOW JUST HOW YOU FEEL 



O you? Then you have paid the price 



of sympathy. You know the differ- 



ence between going through anything 
and experiencing it, a difference not manifestly 
evident to that applicant for a position as a 
teacher, who was asked, "Have you had any 
experience with children?" "Yes," replied the 
applicant complacently, "I have been a child." 
Shakespere made two stages for the acquisition 
of experience, its achieving and its perfecting. 

Experience is by industry achieved 
And perfected in the swift course of time. 
The reason why most persons cannot say, 
"I know just how you feel," is because they 
shrink from the industry necessary to gain 
experience and through experience sympathy. 
They hope to get experience as they get a 
gentle tan, with no activity and no subsequent 
pain. Thinking is always hard; reflection is 




3 



4 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

commonly harder. To reflect is to look back, 
and no one likes to look back. "Forward, 
forward" is the incessant impulse of curious, 
eager, greedy, human nature. "Forward to 
fresh fields and pastures new," urges the jaded 
and sated appetite. No one likes to look back, 
especially upon failures, disappointments, sor- 
rows. Yet mistakes are the best school of 
experience and the most skilled makers of 
sympathy. A thousand dinners you live 
through; one attack of dyspepsia gives you 
experience. If you stub your toe, you will 
look back, you will reflect, you will compare 
and contrast, you will do a deal of hard think- 
ing, you will exercise industry and achieve 
experience in the art of walking. 

"All experience is an arch" says another wise 
writer. Why is it the laughter and games of 
childhood draw from you nothing but a deep, 
low, lion-like growl? Were you not once a 
child? Is it not because the arch of your 
experience displays to your reflections no larger 
expanse than a pin-hole does for the eye? Sloth 
dwarfs and narrows the arch of experience; the 
humiliation of failure makes the vista still 
smaller and when it comes to sympathy, which 



I KNOW JUST HOW YOU FEEL 5 

is altruistic experience, there is often no aper- 
ture at all open to the vision. To say "I know 
just how you feel," demands the disinterested- 
ness of transferring your experience to another. 
When charity would take wings to itself and 
let the hard lessons "by industry achieved" 
bear their swift messages of sympathy to a 
suffering heart, it finds that where there ought 
to be an arch, there is often nothing but a solid 
wall. You have, no doubt, heard of a spite- 
fence, a barrier erected on one's property for 
the purpose of affording to a neighbor a some- 
what limited horizon. Spite-fences are a 
reversal to barbarism. It is a sign of enlight- 
enment and mutual confidence to have no 
fences at all. Now one reason why many do 
not say, "I know just how you feel," is the 
presence of spite-fences in the soul. If the 
neighbor is of another nationality, another state 
or city, another political party, another clique 
or family faction, then there are no hands across 
the barriers. Against those barriers, the char- 
ity which took wings in sympathy beats itself 
to destruction. Only one thing removes all 
such hindrances and that is death. There are 
no spite-fences around the grave-yard. The 



6 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

heart does not beat which will not pray over 
all the graves of all the dead. That heart is 
dead itself. 

How comes it that one woman will see a 
single scene of poverty and devote her life to 
the poor; another will live in a hospital and be 
callous? A Damien will have such highly 
sensitized nerves that he feels sufferings five 
thousand miles away, and another will be a 
stone on the battlefield. Even the hard wood 
of the violin is said to grow mellow by harmony 
and to thrill with more delicate response as the 
time goes by. Sympathy for some is a senti- 
mental shudder; for others it is a searing flame. 
There is one thing which makes all these sharp 
divisions and that is love. Love dissolves the 
stone from the heart and makes the callous 
hide as soft and tender as newborn flesh. Ex- 
perience is the first payment you make for 
sympathy; you are the full owner of sympathy 
when you have love. 



ALL FOR THE BEST 



ALL FOR THE BEST 

S far as our experience goes, " 'Tis all for 



the best" is a Celtic idiom, and it was 



made in Ireland. Most people find it 
hard with the English poet to "forecast the 
years" and issue notes of contentment, drawn 
upon the "far-off interest of tears." Eyes 
blinded with tears usually do not see far ahead. 
But the doctors tell us that some races are 
immune to certain diseases because in their 
past history the weak ancestors were thinned 
out by the ravages of diseases and the surviving 
ancestors developed a prophylactic antitoxin 
(so saith high medicinal authority) and became 
disease-proof. The nations which have suf- 
fered sorrow and disaster have become immune 
to despair; they weep; but they do not refuse 
to be comforted. Beyond the mist and dark- 
ness of tears they see a dawn of hope rapidly 




9 



10 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

approaching. What are a few days or a few 
tears when a man has centuries of suffering to 
look back upon? 'Tis all for the best, if for no 
other reason than that all is so much better 
than it was and than it might be. 

"All for the best" voices the experience of a 
people and embodies a religion of suffering. 
It is not a hot-house plant nurtured in the 
tropical conservatories of the rich, the healthy, 
and the famous; it is an Alpine flower which 
clings to barren rocks, near the snow line, and 
has tough, fibrous roots and stalk to hold out 
against wintry gales. "All" shows that the 
principle is universal in its application, com- 
prehending every event of life. "Best" shows 
the principle is superlative in its excellence, 
and will admit no limitation to its consummate 
perfection. This is the consoling belief which 
infuriates our good friends, the Socialists. 
They have a well-founded grievance against 
Heaven because they believe they are already 
condemned to the eternal torments — of earth. 
"All for the best," cry these anti-celestials. 
" You mean ' all for the worst.' " No, we mean 
what we say, and we would rather live in this 
fool's paradise of "all for the best," if it is 



ALL FOR THE BEST 11 

such a paradise, than wear out a weary exist- 
ence in any gloomy, sandy, flinty, hopeless 
Gehenna of Socialism. It was a hot-headed 
Italian cavalier who was hit upon the nose by 
a snow-ball and drew his sword to chastise 
his tormentor. A merry laugh suddenly rang 
out, and he sheathed his sword, when he found 
it was a roguish damsel who had so honored 
him. How much depends upon our belief! 
A fancied insult may be in reality a compliment 
and a favor. "All for the best" believes that 
Divine Providence is pelting us with very soft 
and very harmless snow-balls. "All for the 
worst" is convinced that we are being bom- 
barded by pestiferous imps with deadly missiles! 

There are two directions to be followed in 
the administering of this specific of sorrow. 
It should not be given too soon nor should it 
be allowed to become an opiate. To order a 
coffin instead of a cough-mixture, when your 
child begins to clear its throat, is premature 
resignation. To drug one's self into a stupor 
after the funeral, to drop the sun and blot out 
the stars from the sky, to resort to liquor or 
listlessness rather than to labor, this is not pa- 
tience but pessimism. "All for the best" 



CHAFF AND WHEAT 



supposes you have done your best. "All for 
the best" does not rob you of life and energy. 
That hopeful religion tells you that with its 
elasticity the harder you are hit the higher you 
should rebound. It is a salve for defeat, not a 
soporific against exertion. 

On further consideration, it is more true 
to say that no nation has a copyright to this 
phrase. "All for the best" is the child of sor- 
row and of heavenly hope. It echoed in the 
songs of the Hebrew Psalmist: "We have re- 
joiced for the years in which we have seen 
evils." It lit up the dark catacombs with its 
brightness and opened Heaven above the 
blood-red sands of the arena. When the pain, 
death, and degradation of the Cross became 
the very promise and assurance of Easter 
immortality and exultation, then every human 
heart knew that truly all is for the best. 



PASSING IT ALONG 



PASSING IT ALONG 



E was a small-sized, weak man, and 



some one had struck his father. "Who 



hit my father?" he cried, rushing out 
in a rage. "I did," replied a big, strong 
Goliath. The modern David looked in every 
other direction, and muttering to himself, "He 
better not do it again," retired discreetly into 
his house. What he did when the door closed 
cannot with certainty be stated, but it is quite 
probable the doughty champion stepped on 
the cat's tail, kicked the dog into the next 
room, and so went to supper. Cowardice is 
responsible for that particularly shameful 
species of meanness, which may be described 
as passing it along. When the heart drops into 
the boots, there is often an unholy tendency to 
tread upon some one's toes or to kick defense- 
less shins. Passing it along is essentially a 




15 



16 



CHAFF AND WHEAT 



downward tendency and loves to work in the 
dark and out of sight. 

Adam was the first to pass it along to some 
one else weaker, and it took but a short time 
for the lesson to be learned. Adam's wife 
passed it along to the serpent, and the serpent, 
no doubt, blamed it on its family. Adam's 
son followed the precedent set. He was 
smarting under a rebuke, and with the mag- 
nificent logic accompanying this frame of 
mind, endeavored to show how unjust the 
rebuke was by killing his brother, and so con- 
siderably relieving his feelings. An eye for 
an eye was a cruel principle, but its practice 
called for some bravery. To pass it back is 
not as contemptible as passing it along. 

But you exclaim in horror against such a 
mean principle as, "You hit my back and I 
will hit another back." No one, you think, 
would have such low and base feelings; much 
less act upon them. Then it never happens 
that the pupils are wincing at some unexplained 
sharpness in the school-teacher; that the school- 
principal has, that same morning, snapped at 
the school-teacher; that the school-superin- 
tendent has written a scorching letter which 



PASSING IT ALONG 



17 



arrived by the morning's mail to sting the 
school-principal; that an editorial note in the 
daily paper commented sarcastically on a cer- 
tain school-superintendent; that — but you see 
at this rate we would soon be back to Adam 
again. It is desirable that passing it along 
were as infrequent as it is inhuman; then the 
peace-maker would not feel the united force of 
both combatants visited upon him, then 
reprisals would be relegated to the savagery 
whence they came, then no teacher would 
punish a whole class for one. The growth of 
civilization has often been described as handing 
on a lighted torch; passing it along is the bar- 
barism which hands the neighbor the flaming 
end. 

Our days have seen wonderful improvements 
in machinery and marvelous transformations 
in raw material through mechanical devices. 
Drop a log of wood and a lump of iron at the 
back-door of a factory, and in a few minutes 
an automobile will roll out of the front door. 
Feed a printing-press with molten lead, paper 
and ink, and behold it hands out to you 
Shakespere's works done up in a special box. 
The man or woman who starts an endless chain 



18 CHAFF AND WHEAT 



of passing it along would shrink in horror if 
the latest product of this merciless machinery 
could be seen. A bad letter arms the business 
man against his meek manager; the manager 
barks viciously at his clerk; the clerk finds 
supper cold, tasteless and gritty, and the wife 
goes weeping from the room to slap her eldest 
for twiddling his thumbs, and then Algernon 
pulls the hair of little Esmeralda, who jerks 
the baby into howling wakefulness, who in 
turn sets the neighbors quarreling, starts a 
riot, sets the house on fire, calls out the whole 
fire-department — pass it along yourself, re- 
membering that if a line of freight-cars trans- 
mit a bumping, the jolt will come traveling 
back again to its origin. 

If you could make any link of that chain 
say, "It serves me right, and I deserve much 
more myself," then the unholy tendency to 
pass it along would be turned in upon self and 
would stop instantly and do great good to one 
at least. But, alas, most people do not resort 
to the relief of such a confession. "Why, 
then," asked John of Tom, "did not father 
whip you as he whipped me, if, as you say, 
your conscience was worried and you had to 



PASSING IT ALONG 



19 



confess about the stolen jam?" "Oh," said 
Tom, "I confessed on you alone." Confess 
on yourself; don't pass it along. 



ONCE UPON A TIME 



ONCE UPON A TIME 

THERE was a man who had two good 
friends and they were very true to him. 
He understood that they were friends 
of his father too and had promised that they 
would take particular care of the son. They 
were not demonstrative or obtrusive friends. 
In fact, the man was often ashamed of himself 
that boisterous and boon companions more 
frequently rang his door-bell and dined with 
him. Sometimes indeed the man was stricken 
with twinges of remorse and on making up a 
theater-party or planning a fishing trip or 
some other pleasant jaunt, he sent his friends 
an invitation to be present, but they declined. 
"Chaps like us," they answered, "would only 
be in the way." 

The man could not remember when Constant 
and Victor, as his father called them familiarly, 
entered into his life. As with most thoughtless 



24 



CHAFF AND WHEAT 



and unreflecting youngsters, he took favors 
from all sides and paid but little attention to 
his benefactors. One day, however, in the 
September after graduating from the High 
School, he was wondering what he must do, 
when whom should he meet but Constant. 
"What's the matter?" he was asked cheerily, 
and, on giving his answer, he was persuaded 
that the place for the High School graduate 
was college. Victor was not near at the time, 
but fortunately happened in at the end of the 
lad's first month at college and safely tided 
him over a fit of blues. The man, reviewing 
his college days, could not say to which of the 
two he should be more grateful. Constant 
came to visit him more frequently, but Victor 
came on special occasions and just when 
needed. When they came together, as not 
infrequently happened, the man remembered 
those occasions as red-letter days of his college 
career. Often he noticed that Victor's visit 
followed closely upon Constant's, and he sus- 
pected that there was an understanding be- 
tween them. Several occasions stood out 
prominently, and he recalled them with special 
gratitude to Victor. There was the finish of 



ONCE UPON A TIME 



25 



the mile-run when he thought he should never 
head the rival runner. It was just then when 
all seemed lost, he heard Victor's voice and 
its thrill lifted the lead from his feet, unwound 
his dead muscles and hurled him over the line 
a winner. Again, it was the night of the prize 
debate. He rose for his rebuttal with a feeling 
that all was lost. He caught sight of Victor's 
eyes fixed shining upon him and fought like 
one inspired and turned defeat into success. 
Most gratefully of all he remembers the day 
he was about to give up college, even despite 
the urging of Constant. He fortunately heard 
from the other friend, and Victor's eloquent 
message kept him studying till he received his 
diploma and degree. "It was Constant," he 
told everybody, "who brought me to college, 
but it was Victor who made me graduate." 

The man's friends had come to spend a night 
with him. He had wished to thank them for 
his success in life and finally he had prevailed 
upon them to visit him. No others were there. 
The meeting took place in the library. When 
he clasped their hands, it was already growing 
dark. "My good friends," the man said tremu- 
lously, "I have not shown you the gratitude 



26 



CHAFF AND WHEAT 



you deserve. You have stood by me always. 
More so when I faced life than when preparing 
for it. I was beginning to dissipate, when you, 
Constant, checked me and you, Victor, held 
me fast. Were it not for your help, I should 
never have dared to follow what was right in 
my profession and would not be occupying the 
high position which I now hold." 

Then in rivalry the two friends told the man 
some of their many exploits. Constant it was 
who had inspired a Great Leader to fit Himself 
for His career amid the privations and the 
solitude of the desert, and Victor came in 
opportunely to comfort the Leader when the 
struggle was at its worst. "It was I," said 
Constant, "who made the Leader enter 
bravely into His Agony." "It was I," re- 
turned Victor, "who made Him, being in His 
Agony, to pray the more." "Who then are 
you?" cried the startled man. "Are you not 
my father's friends? " " My name is Courage," 
replied Constant. "And mine, Pluck," an- 
swered Victor; "And we always see the Face of 
thy Father Who is in heaven," said both. At 
that the man looked up dazed and saw no one, 
but only the moonlight falling upon his Crucifix. 



"YOU SHALL." "I WON'T" 



"YOU SHALL." "I WON'T" 

IT is one thing to burn dynamite; it is a 
splintered cliff and often a funeral, to 
detonate dynamite. The slowly and per- 
sistently dropping water may figure in the 
realms of proverbs as a reliable excavator, 
but the cry for quick results precludes its 
frequent use for digging foundations. The 
drop of water gently taps one particle of stone; 
a detonator must shock into instantaneous and 
simultaneous activity a million particles with 
exaggerated tendencies toward divorce. Hence 
explosions! As a first-class detonator to en- 
, gender moral explosions we recommend highly 
the brief dialog used as a title to these remarks. 
If there is anything which will send a shock 
through every ramification of man's muscles, 
veins and nerves more quickly and more 
vehemently than the pointed directness of this 
short but animated conversation, we should 
like to see it. 

29 



30 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

People do not resort immediately at the 
beginning of a conversation to the monosyllabic 
brevity of " shall " and " won't." Sometimes, in- 
deed, there are such sudden head-on collisions in 
life, collisions, however, which have begun on far- 
away tracks and are driven by long since devel- 
oped energy; but, as a rule, head-on collisions do 
not come at once. The dynamite enmity begins 
to burn before it is detonated. A sultry period 
is followed by heat; then far off there is sheet- 
lightning; and then comes the flash-lightning 
of "You shall" and " I won't," and detonated 
storm-clouds drift apart into darkness, mutter- 
ing sullenly. Alas, for the subsequent gloom 
with little illumination, and that light of an 
unpleasant kind from gleaming eyes! Enter 
Rembrandt to picture the black looks backward 
of smarting wrongs, the black looks outward of 
anger, the black looks inward of brooding re- 
sentment, the black looks forward of revenge. 
"You shall" and "I won't" lay on the thick 
shadows in life's picture gallery. 

Sometimes the opposition has been focused 
to so intense and so warm a point that this 
little tug-of-war does not find expression in 
words only; it tingles through clenched fists; 



"you shall." "i won't" 31 

it puts a strain on dental enamel and flames 
in steely looks. Without this pointed vehe- 
mence, wherein two souls hurl themselves at each 
other, the positive and negative determination 
of "shall' 5 and "won't," our sports would be as 
thrilling as a sewing-bee. Tell a man to wallow 
in the mud and crawl and squirm through 
slush for one hundred yards with you on his 
back, and he will think you crazy. Tell the 
same man that he shall not get to two sticks 
some distance away, and with detonated vigor 
he answers, "I will," and he proceeds to plow 
deeper into the mud with twenty-one men on 
his back. If you ever have marveled at broken 
legs, broken ribs, and broken necks, in other 
words, foot-ball, see whether "shall" and 
"won't" are not the duelists that fill our 
autumn hospitals. From the chip on Brian's 
shoulder which puts a shillalah into Boru's 
hand, up to the twenty-inch gun which in its 
turn provokes a two-foot gun, it is the same 
spirit of opposition working. The national 
"will" thunders from a thousand howitzers, 
and the national "you shall not" comes echoing 
back from a thousand and one bigger howitzers. 
Most vices are virtues gone wrong. So it is 



32 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

here. The clash of will with will is responsible 
for all the horrors of war, as well as the poison- 
ous meanness of any two pettily jealous souls, 
but it is the same clash of wills which has 
made heroes and martyrs. Perhaps the tenac- 
ity of good will is not as frequent as the stub- 
bornness of evil-will. Virtue burns where vice 
explodes. Many of our good missionaries in 
their fervent sermons are striving energetically 
to find some thought which will make the 
stagnant blood of sluggishness flame into 
detonated energy. Oh, for a Nero to cry, 
"You shall offer incense to the idol of indiffer- 
ence"; then might ten thousand answer back 
with explosive suddenness, "We won't." On 
the day of General Judgment it may be dis- 
covered that one reason why an all-ruling Prov- 
idence permitted the Menace, was to make 
certain Catholics fight their way to Mass. 



TO RAGE OR NOT TO RAGE 



TO RAGE OR NOT TO RAGE 



HE doctor, by means of a pocket-ther- 



mometer, can gauge your temperature. 



You await with ill-concealed anxiety 
the verdict of a little thread of mercury and a 
few scratches on a glass tube. That tiny frac- 
tion of an inch may mean another week in bed 
or the resumption of your normal life. There 
is a golden opportunity awaiting inventors to 
lighten the burden of prudence and give that 
overworked virtue a measure by which it can 
arrive at quick and easier decisions. Health 
has a normal temperature, and fluctuations 
above or below are warnings to take pre- 
cautions. Virtue, too, has its normal, and 
prudence is the doctor, but, alas, prudence 
has no thermometer. Take any ordinary day 
of any ordinary individual, and you will find 
him subject to varying fluctuations in the 
heat of the soul. Is this the time and place, 




35 



36 



CHAFF AND WHEAT 



the soul asks, to flare into anger, or must one 
chill into meekness? Gwendoline is growing 
more fond of evading the domestic curfew-law. 
Shall mother put down her anger or put down 
her foot? Jack brings home bad reports from 
school. Shall father provide candy or a cane? 
The school-teacher has exhausted his supply 
of various looks, looks of surprise, of astonish- 
ment, of grief, of pain, of vexation; he has also 
run through the gamut of different expressions, 
request giving place to demand, demand to 
expostulation, expostulation to command, com- 
mand to threat, and now the harassed peda- 
gogue applies to prudence for a diagnosis. 
Shall the storm burst into lightning-flash and 
thunder-roar, or must it pass by with dark 
clouds only and with an undischarged volley? 
Restraint or the rod, which shall it be? 

Perhaps some may never have explored this 
twilight-land between virtue and virtue where 
prudence holds its sway. In the world of 
flowers there are plants which mature slowly 
and bloom once a century, while other plants 
need but a few hours to burst into bloom. In the 
world of combustibles you have green wood and 
dry powder. In the world of temperaments 



TO RAGE OR NOT TO RAGE 37 

you have century plants and johnny- jump-ups; 
you have some that ignite and others that 
explode. These latter find a fever-chart as 
useless as a rapid-firing gun would find it. 
Yet even artillery needs cooling, and your most 
fiery temperament cannot go too far without 
serious consequences to itself, not to mention 
the immediate objectives of its wrath. The 
more rapid-firing the gun, the more carefully 
must it be tempered, and explosives are notably 
in need of careful handling. 

If prudence has delicate work laid out for it 
in determining where weakness should flame 
into anger, it has no less trouble in settling the 
precise point where resentment should change 
to resignation. Elementary common-sense 
dictates that, when a stone-wall is met with and 
when there is no better catapult at hand than 
a human head, the most impatient must wait 
for a while, at least, until siege guns can come 
up. No one, unless he has won the champion- 
ship for sprinting, will flap a red flag in the 
eyes of an angry bull. In olden days it was 
advised to feign death when you met a bear. 
Whether modern bears are so dainty about 
having live food is not altogether certain, but 



38 



CHAFF AND WHEAT 



the silence and chill of death is often the best 
attitude to assume toward human bears. The 
time will come in Gwendoline's life and in 
Jack's life when the anger of mother and 
father will be seen to be waste ammunition. 
If meek reproach and angry rebuke have 
failed, then the value of education and of pro- 
tected innocence will have to be taught to 
these troublesome children by severer teachers 
than their parents. Let father and mother 
turn to prayer rather than wear themselves 
out by useless fretting, or by trying to burrow 
into a stone-wall. There was One who on a 
time took a lash and wielded it in angry mood, 
but later He had the sword put into its scab- 
bard and was "like a lamb without voice 
before his shearer." 



THE DOGMATIST 



THE DOGMATIST 



INTRODUCTORY Note: "He" and "His" 
and "Him" are used here in a bisexual 
sense. This observation is made to pre- 
clude any dogmatizing about one sex to the 
exclusion of the other. The dogmatists of 
either sex may apply the following theorizing 
to the other sex if they are willing to accept 
another's teaching. 

It is still a disputed question whether a 
dogmatist is born or made. Self-made men 
are commonly accused of dogmatism, and it 
must be confessed that their development 
usually fits them for the part. But not all 
self-made men are dogmatists. Your saints 
are in great part self-made men, approved by 
heaven and canonized on earth. Yet the 
saints are the least dogmatic of mortals. The 

reason, no doubt, is that saints know and 
41 



42 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

recognize that though they had to work 
strenuously to make themselves, yet, after all, 
they were only one factor in the manufacture. 
Many other self-made men are humble enough 
to admit the same fact. The dogmatist is one 
who recognizes his own superiority and is as 
oblivious of any contributory causes to his 
excellence as the Washington Monument would 
be if it were suddenly to become conscious of 
its own existence. Enamored of its own su- 
premacy, it would admit no retrospective grati- 
tude to quarry-men, scaffolding and masons. 
The shining whiteness of its tapering beauty, 
its wide outlook, its massive grandeur, would 
make it forget that its feet were rooted in mud. 
This is a better illustration than you at first 
might imagine. With straight lines, with op- 
pressive weight, with index-finger ever pointing 
to the zenith, with inflexible, unyielding rigid- 
ity, a marble monument is not a bad likeness 
to a dogmatist. 

Your true dogmatist is a biped university. 
Every morning as he opens the paper, he at 
once prescribes a dozen new courses; a course 
of tactics for the generals of all opposing 
armies, some exercises in automobiling for 



THE DOGMATIST 



43 



chauffeurs, a code of suggestions for directing 
a political campaign, a table of hints for mar- 
ried people, and so for the rest of mankind, 
ending up with a new policy for the editorial 
page. After the usual morning lessons in 
domestic economy, which he scatters about at 
home, he betakes himself to the awaiting 
world, administering extension lectures to 
slouchy individuals by assuming a finer dig- 
nity in his own carriage, to strident talkers by 
making prominent the mellower modulation 
of his own tones. His vocation to teach weighs 
so heavily upon him that he feels every member 
of his body constitutes a faculty in this am- 
bulatory university. 

Upon his arrival anywhere his fellow-men 
assume the attitude of listeners at once. Why 
should any one be permitted to talk in class 
while the lecture is in progress? An interrup- 
tion is an impertinence; a difficulty is an in- 
sult; a sustained objection merits contemptuous 
expulsion into exterior darkness. Does the 
lecturer err? Impossible. He is such an adept 
in theorizing that he can walk as fast and as 
dignifiedly and as educationally backward as 
he can forward. He is the author of the 



44 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

favorite war-phrase, "Checking the enemy by 
rapidly taking up strategic positions in a con- 
tinually receding rear." Why does not the 
magnitude of his task break through the key- 
stone of his arching brow as he permits his 
revered head to sink solemnly to rest after a 
day of world's tutoring? It must be due to 
the intrinsic solidity of the constituent ele- 
ments. His brains are monumental. 

There must, indeed, be dogmas, but it should 
be carefully noted that the Catholic Church, 
which holds tenaciously to dogma, does so for 
two very good reasons. Those reasons are 
that the dogmas come from infinite wisdom 
and infinite truth. The Church is dogmatic 
in the sense that it cannot betray what it 
knows to be the truth. The Church does not 
encourage dogmatists. "Unless you be as 
little children" is the ideal of the Church, as 
well as of the Founder of the Church. The 
child does not imagine itself a teacher with an 
imperialistic vocation to set every one else 
right and impart to them its own ideas. Noth- 
ing could be less of a dogmatist than a little 
child. Grown-ups could afford to take example. 



SIMPLIFYING LIFE 



SIMPLIFYING LIFE 



VERY once in a while some newspaper 



or other interviews a nonagenarian or 



centenarian to find out how to live a 
hundred years. Various responses have been 
given to the interviewers. Living in the coun- 
try, living in the city; early rising in the morn- 
ing or the same in the afternoon; eating meat 
and avoiding meat, are some of the ajiswers 
received. Recently the dodging of automobiles 
has become one of the favorite ways of pro- 
longing life. All such questioning and replying 
are particular exemplifications of a general 
tendency. Mankind is looking for one simple 
answer to all its needs. The problem of work 
would be solved forever by perpetual motion. 
The problem of worry is solved by countless 
advertisements. The problem of health has 
ceased to exist in the columns of the press, if 

you omit the daily news, the obituary column 
47 




48 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

and the Monday-morning-automobile-supple- 
ment and peruse only the patent-medicine 
section. The problem of shopping is simplified 
by "buying everything at our store." The 
orchestra, opera and play will soon be con- 
veniently located in your own home within 
easy reach of an electric button near your 
couch, and that will simplify the many prob- 
lems connected with opera-cloaks and ticket- 
scalpers. 

A famous health-specialist recently an- 
nounced that he had successfully passed his 
seventieth year and had avoided digging his 
grave by his teeth. The announcement re- 
called a significant incident. At the time of 
the Spanish- American war a breathless young- 
ster rushed up to an older friend and cried 
out: "Two Spanish vessels have been sunk," 
and then added cautiously, "I do not know 
whether this is a fact or only news." It took a 
Boston lad to establish the subtle distinction 
between news and facts. The same caution is 
necessary with regard to the many simplifica- 
tions of life's problems found in the press. 
They may be facts, they may be "only news," 
or they may be an echo of the advertising 



SIMPLIFYING LIFE 49 

department. The story of the teeth may, for 
example, represent a slackening of trade 
among dentists and a reciprocity treaty be- 
tween the news column and the advertising 
column. 

There is this much truth in these simple 
formulas of health, that most of them will work 
out if the patient is persistent. The man who 
is true to early rising will owe his long life, 
not so much to his alarm-clock as to the 
thousand other things he must do if he will 
persevere in his habit. Late entertainments 
and late suppers will cease. Cold mornings — 
and there are few warm mornings — will neces- 
sitate an immense deal of stamping of feet and 
swinging of arms and other brisk movements. 
This splendid exercise will develop a magnifi- 
cent appetite. Breakfast will fit one for a 
day's work. A day's work will tire a man out 
early. Then comes the merciless alarm again. 
It is not the one practice which makes non- 
agenarians, but the one thousand other prac- 
tices which perseverance makes inevitable. 

There have been many widely heralded short 
cuts to sanctity as there have been to every- 
thing else. Some are mere superstition, and 



50 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

some are solid sense. "Get one virtue and 
you get all" is a simple and safe formula to 
make a saint. No one can practice one virtue 
without ultimately practicing all if he persists. 
He will become an imperialist of the soul. 
His will shall grow like Rome from a small 
town to the ends of the inhabited globe. "One 
thing is wanting," "One thing is necessary," 
"All the law is fulfilled in one word," these and 
other phrases are some simplified rules of holi- 
ness, practical and effective rules if properly 
understood and properly applied. Not all 
formulas are fads; some are facts, and really do 
simplify matters. 



THAT BLESSED WORD, AUTOMATIC 



THAT BLESSED WORD, AUTOMATIC 



UTO" was once a suspicious addition 



to a word. Autocrat was disliked; 



autobiography was not in great favor. 
Now all is different. Nothing is more desirable 
in life or more attractive in advertising than 
"auto." We are hastening to the paradise of 
automatism. Homer's imagination was con- 
sidered extravagant when he dreamt of self- 
growing crops for a farmer's paradise and self- 
sailing ships for a nautical paradise. Now 
such dreams would leave the most simple 
reader unmoved. Plowless fields and rudder- 
less ships are tame to modern minds. From 
twilight sleep and the motherless incubator 
to euthanasia and the auto-hearse, life is grow- 
ing ever more effortless and more automatic. 

Painless study is approaching. When you 
left the nursery for school, the educational 
value of play was not properly appreciated. 
The idea of the teacher seemed to have been 




54 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

to keep you working all the time at home as 
well as at school, and it was the idea of your 
parents, jealous of the teacher's tasks, to heap 
up a thousand additional chores for you to do 
throughout the intervening spaces of your 
life. Play in your boyhood or girlhood was 
a kind of piracy with mysterious whistles and 
stealthy exits and fearful moments of expectant 
discovery and the thrill of narrow escapes. 
Now play is a whole science in itself with 
curriculums and diplomas and professors and 
all that. The park and play-ground are the 
university of to-morrow. Bookless schools 
are on the way. Photography and the mov- 
ing picture have replaced the novel, the short- 
story, the newspaper, cartoons, advertise- 
ments, comic supplements, sports and all. Is 
there any reason why history should not go on 
the screen and poetry too? The Crusaders 
could fare across the world on one reel. "Wait 
a moment, please." Then on the next reel 
Mary, Mary's lamb, Mary's school, would 
serve to unfold to delighted eyes the tragic 
poem, which in more barbarous days would 
be laboriously transferred to a rebellious 
memory. 



THAT BLESSED WORD, AUTOMATIC 55 

AH music has been automatized by a punc- 
tured paper or a dinted record; mathematics is 
handled by the comptometer; escalators and 
moving platforms take you up where the auto- 
cars have set you down; tireless cooking, pre- 
digested food, and eupeptic tablets have made 
eating in all its stages automatic. If some 
muscle or organ should fail in its duty, the 
offending member is harnessed to a machine 
and an electric current, and exercise is given 
to you without exertion on your part. But 
why worry about members? They may soon 
be atrophied to ornaments. . Walking will 
eventually be one of the lost arts. Many oc- 
cupations of the fingers have gone. For let- 
ters you may talk into a tube, puncture a 
paper, run the stencil through a type-writer, 
let your letter pass on to a folding, sealing, 
stamping machine into a pneumatic delivery 
which will pass on the letter to your friend 
across the continent, there to be self-opened 
and thrown on the screen for his easy perusal. 
Fingers may serve to display jewelry, but if 
they have been eliminated from writing and 
music, why not from all else? You can play 
an orchestra by pressing a button; will not a 



56 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

switchboard soon be enough to carry on 
war? 

Self-starters, self -speeders, self -stoppers, these 
are the triumphs of automatism. Yes, but 
what of self-restraint, self-denial, self-control? 
"Not so loud!" Light a candle or in extreme 
cases make out a check. Religion cannot 
escape the monopoly of automatism. Let 
religion be all feeling. "One impulse from a 
vernal wood" will make one feel holy for a 
week, if the automobile does not figure in the 
Monday morning casualty list. Feeling is 
spontaneous and apparently automatic. To be 
virtuous is to check and control feeling; it is 
to act in accordance with principle; it is to be 
obedient to law. Wanted, an invention to 
make all virtues self-acting and f rictionless ! 
On with the spread of automatism! 



THIS VALE OF SUNNY SHADOWS 



THIS VALE OF SUNNY SHADOWS 

IT has been well said that there will be no 
newspapers in heaven. Newspapers are 
largely gloom and sparingly sunshine. 
When you leave out wars, plagues, suicides, 
fires, obituaries, grand juries looking for "the 
man higher up," divorces, movements for 
"social uplift," agitations of various kinds, 
increase in the number of "dry States," femi- 
nism, all that remains to eke out a few rays of 
gladness are one or two weddings and the 
advertising columns, that most optimistic fea- 
ture of modern life. Imagine a newsboy sent 
out with such head-lines as: "Interviews with 
a Million Merry Mothers," "Church Attend- 
ance on the Increase," "Happy Tenants and 
Happy Janitors," "Died Quietly in His Bed; 
Life without a * Grouch,' Grumble or Growl." 
Alas, poor newsboy, you would hawk your 
papers in vain. Can it be that Homer was 

59 



60 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

right in describing his characters as having a 
satisfaction in sorrow, as taking their fill of 
weeping? What is there in bad news that it 
should be cabled, while good news must wait 
for the mails, if it goes at all? The germ 
theory of disease is making us all uncomfort- 
able these days. Are we at times carriers, we 
wonder, of some disease? Or do we number 
among our friends a Typhoid Mary, a Dys- 
pepsia Dan, an Infant-Paralysis Iphigenia? 
Of this, at least, we can be fairly certain, that 
there is no dearth of gloom-carriers. For one 
optimistic Felix, you will find a thousand pessi- 
mistic Dolores. 

There is a certain happy nun in a hospital, 
whose laugh has been said to be as good as a 
doctor. Better, we should say. That same 
nun, as her neighbors know, began early to 
laugh her way through life, and now that she 
has laughed herself into a convent and ap- 
propriately gravitated toward the hospital, 
it is to be desired that all the hospitals of the 
world do at once call up her number and have 
that medicinal laugh telephoned to all the 
patients. It is sadly premature to put Dante's 
despairing sign over the gateway of life. " Kill- 



THIS VALE OF SUNNY SHADOWS 61 

gloom" is the post-office address of one cheerful 
mother; it ought to be the address of every 
home. In that case fewer would be persuaded 
that the hour before the dawn is a long time 
coming to an end. What is inscribed on the 
banner you fling to the breeze in the parade of 
life, "Abandon hope" or "Kill-gloom"? 

There used to be one fountain, ever gurgling 
forth joyousness in life; one source of sunshine 
that had experienced no eclipse. That was 
the "good old days." Men and women in 
their darkest moments could say: "It was 
different years ago." But it remained for our 
time to reduce that happy age to a myth. A 
German professor began to look up the pot of 
gold where that rainbow of optimism came 
down, and he found that in the "good old days" 
of our generation there was a united dirge, 
wailing about contemporary woe and pointing 
back to the "good old days" of a former time. 
Back he went from generation to generation, 
from century to century, and the "good old 
days" kept ever ahead of him. When he got 
to Homer, he found the Greek poet lamenting 
that the sons of heroes were worse than their 
fathers. Homer's oldest hero, too, was the 



62 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

loudest in praise of the "good old days" when 
he was young. 

There is, however, one unfailing source of 
brightness. Some people have adored the sun, 
and perhaps do so still. The sun deserves 
much respect, but not idolatry. The sun is 
the earth's painter and lamp-light and hearth- 
fire and life-giver. Yet it casts shadows, and 
they are not always bright and warming. Far 
more cheerful is that sunshine in whose shadow 
even health and life is found, as the first 
Christians discovered, and laid their sick where 
Peter's shadow might fall upon them and make 
them sound. What a foretaste of heaven if our 
door-bell was a signal in every instance for 
the entrance of Peter with an antiseptic shad- 
ow, rather than of some infectious pessimist, 
who dilates gloomily upon the " hot-enough" 
sunshine and gloats over the depressing fact 
that the idolized sun is marred with gigantic 
spots, and, moreover, that the spots are respon- 
sible for all the storms of earth! 



HARPING ON ONE STRING 



HARPING ON ONE STRING 

IN the museums of large cities you may see 
collections of old instruments of music 
representing the progress of that harmoni- 
ous art from the few simple notes of early days 
to the intricate harmonies of our day. Civiliza- 
tion has advanced beyond the stage of a few 
strings up to the serried ranks of musical steel 
which you may see in a piano. The solitary 
individual, therefore, who does his harping on 
one string, is a relic of barbarism; he belongs 
to the same strata of civilization as the Hotten- 
tot, the Australian bush-ranger, and the primi- 
tive Patagonian. 

It is related of a good, holy priest, who was in 
charge of a school, that one night, because of 
some trouble, he lost an hour of sleep. At once 
he proceeded to strip the varied and multiple 
harmony of life of its diversified melody and 

devoted himself to an energetic see-sawing 
65 



66 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

upon one monotonous string. In the last offi- 
cial communication he was still rasping one 
lugubrious strain about the lost hour. More 
monotonous, more discordant he than another 
eminent soloist of history, who "produced" 
variety out of most unpromising material. In 
a "colored" band in Southern Maryland was 
a bass-drummer whose execution fixed the at- 
tention of his audience. His proficiency was 
so marked that he was invited to play a solo 
on the bass-drum. The performance was a 
unique one, and despite obvious handicaps, the 
performer managed by changes in tune and 
volume and by different groupings of his beats 
to escape the lowest degree of monotony. The 
chief merit that commended itself to the audi- 
ence was the drummer's seriousness and the 
manifest admiration of the rest of the band. 
But this Marylander was no match, either in 
taking himself seriously or in producing iterated 
sameness, for the international soloist, the 
harper on one string. 

The favorite tunes of this musician are known 
to all. There are the pathetic ballads: "I am 
keeping watchful waiting, for he trod upon my 
toes;" "I never, never, can forget what she 



HARPING ON ONE STRING 67 

has said;" "I wouldn't care at all, at all, if 
anybody else." There are also the well- 
known dead-marches with the usual harp 
accompaniment, entitled, "I never dreamt 
that she," and "And at the time he was my 
dearest friend." The repertory is not varied, 
but it makes up in strenuous exertion what it 
lacks in diversity. 

Next to shattered friendships, shattered 
health is the subject most in favor with these 
musicians. They will drop in to see you and, 
without waiting for an invitation, you will 
have a recitative on the liver or on the ravages 
of the lumbago. A solo on "How I got dys- 
pepsia when I worked in Baltimore" is suc- 
ceeded perhaps by a thrilling duet with another 
performer, "What's the latest youVe been 
taking for your rheumatism, dear?" Some- 
times these dolorous complaints are humorous 
enough. A good, old priest was dying at the 
age of eighty-three. He had a grievance 
against himself: "If I had not been careless 
of my health when young," he whispered sadly, 
"I would not now be in such a bad way." 
Unhappily, however, these sad solos evoke 
more tears than smiles. There is no humor 



68 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

in the man with a grievance, who has received 
one wound and keeps it open, who has on file 
the bullet which hit him and often broods over 
it, who sings his song of sorrow a thousand 
times oftener to himself than he does to others. 
Indeed, such a one is not simply near bar- 
barism; he is on the verge of insanity, one most 
potent cause of which is the fixed idea, and the 
harper on one string is the victim of such an 
obsession. 

The sovereign remedy is to learn at least one 
other tune, a tune of heavenly harmony, a 
tune that deserves and will receive an indefinite 
number of encores. "How often shall my 
brother offend against me, and I forgive him?" 
"Till seven times?" "I say not to thee till 
seven times, but till seventy times seven 
times." When you learn Hebrew you will 
find that is quite often. Harp on that string. 



EUPHEMIA AND THE EUPHEMISTS 



EUPHEMIA AND THE EUPHEMISTS 

EUPHEMIA is a country whose discovery 
dates back before the dawn of history. 
The Greeks named the land and sent 
large colonies to it. The geographical boun- 
daries have never been clearly settled. South 
of Euphemia lies a very thickly populated 
nation called Mendacia. The Euphemists are 
such great friends and allies of the Mendacians 
that they have not gone to the trouble of 
surveying their respective territories, or of es- 
tablishing definite boundaries. To the north, 
however, is the land of Sinceria, not at all 
friendly to its southern neighbors and sharply 
divided from Euphemia in landscape and 
climate. Euphemia is a land of shady valleys 
and heavy mists, whereas Sinceria is a bracing, 
mountainous country, swept bright by stiff 
winds. 

The first point a traveler would notice in 



72 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

Euphemia would be the silence of all the 
children. They may occasionally be seen, 
but never heard. The enfant terrible is either 
gagged to silence or packed off to school amid 
the hills of Sinceria, until the period of self- 
consciousness dawns. This custom was first 
introduced when the King of Euphemia was 
paying a visit to one of his subjects. A par- 
ticularly well-behaved child said to him, mak- 
ing a pretty curtsey: "Your majesty is a won- 
derful man." "Why do you say that?" asked 
the charmed King. "Because mama told me 
to," replied the child, who was rushed off that 
very night to a boarding-school in Sinceria. 

The stranger would notice one odd fashion of 
Euphemia: its partiality for the color white. 
For furs the Euphemists favor sheep's clothing. 
Everything in Euphemia is kept white- washed, 
and as no weather-proof enamel has been as 
yet invented there, the process of applying 
new coats of white, when the former applica- 
tion is soiled or scaling off, has to be continually 
carried on. For this reason most of the in- 
habitants know something of the art. All the 
sepulchers even are whitened. It should, 
however, be noted that the Euphemists them- 



EUPHEMIA AND THE EUPHEMISTS 73 

selves never employ the terms, grave and 
sepulcher. They refer to the ultimate resting- 
place and the ancestral mausoleum. An ex- 
ception to the prevailing color-scheme of 
mother-of-pearl, which is Euphemistic for 
white, is found in a substance once styled 
rouge, but now known as rose-talcum. The 
rose-talcum is worn over the universal smile 
that is a national trait of the Euphemists. An 
inhabitant, since ostracized, likened the smile 
to patent-leather or vaseline. 

The language of Euphemia is especially 
worthy of note. The merchants are skillful in 
its use; the lawyers and doctors are more expert 
still in Euphemistic, but if a stranger wishes to 
hear the language spoken in its purity, he must 
mingle in the first society of Euphemia. He will 
note that perfection when his car stops at the 
porte-cochdre. The attendants at the entrance 
will inform him of the unavoidable absence or 
most delighted presence of the occupants of the 
mansion. "Houses" are obsolete in Euphe- 
mistic. He will receive missives, or even epis- 
tles, couched in the exquisite vocabulary of 
regrettable previous engagements, or of su- 
preme felicitations. Should he finally succeed 



74 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

in gaining admission into the inner circle, he 
will notice that sin and vice are vulgar terms. 
At times, however, the white-wash has an un- 
happy propensity for flaking off, and the once 
ornate nomenclature, as in the case of "saloon," 
must be replaced in turn by "restaurant," 
"cafe," "cabaret," and "cafeteria." Euphe- 
mia is sensitive to any lack of respectability. 
Euthanasia and kleptomania are well-known 
substitutes for sordid terms. People in Euphe- 
mia are "frank," "daring," or, perhaps, "indis- 
creet." They incline to new thought, esoteri- 
cism and cosmic affinities, and by this and 
similar parlance, especially by incompatibility 
of temperament, they gracefully drape over a 
multitude of sins — hush ! — the term they use is 
not sins but foibles or, better, atavistic ten- 
dencies. 

It was one of the famous heroes of Euphemia 
who reduced the practice of cleaning the outside 
to a fine art when he rid himself of cowardice, 
injustice and brutal murder, by the simple 
process of washing his hands. It was the same 
Euphemist who asked, "What is truth?" 
Euphemia has never heard the answer. 



WILL YOU GIVE UP? 



WILL YOU GIVE UP? 



W 



ILL you give up?" is the question 
hissed into the small boy's ear by 
his conqueror as he presses the 



head and shoulders of his victim into the mud. 
"Will you give up?" is the cry in the snow-ball 
fights where imaginary forts and flags are 
attacked. When does the boy say, Yes? When 
did you say, Yes, in your fights? Perhaps you 
do not want to admit that you ever gave up. 
It was hard to afford that sweet satisfaction to 
the boy higher up, already beginning to exult in 
your downfall. Is it such repugnance to sur- 
render which wins so much sympathy for the 
under dog? Multiply the feeling of no surren- 
der by millions and dress it up in uniforms, put 
swords for fists and bullets for snow-balls, and 
you have the armies of the world. Much of 
what passes for patriotism is nothing else than 
a refusal to own oneself beaten. Yet if anger 
can be canonized — "Be angry and sin not" — 



77 



78 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

why should the spirit of no surrender be kept 
from enlisting and drilling on the side of right? 

It is not on the battlefield alone this spirit 
reigns, nor need it always thrill through mighty 
frames and huge muscles. The finest exempli- 
fications of the spirit are found where nature has 
given least physical strength. The men in the 
battle-line feel the touch of elbows and hear the 
heartening cry of comrades, but wife and 
mother and daughter fight alone at home. 
Many a man would surrender unless there were 
others looking on; few are the women who give 
up, though they must struggle out of sight in 
the home. The tenderest, the most sensitive 
element in a woman is that very thing which 
makes her endure and fight on long after her 
stronger mate has given up. A woman's love, 
a mother's love, makes weakness might. The 
strange blending of heroic love with physical 
weakness was never, perhaps, better exemplified 
than in that New Jersey teacher who, to protect 
her pupils, bravely faced and killed a venomous 
snake and then fainted away. Her heart made 
her a hero; her imagination drove the blood 
from her cheek and the strength from her limbs. 
The homes of the poor, the schoolrooms of the 



WILL YOU GIVE UP? 79 

world, the bedside of the sick, the cradle and 
the nursery, all these are proofs that if woman 
could fight with her heart she would never give 
up. 

Back of years of evil habits, buried under the 
dead weight of indulgence, there lies the spirit 
of no surrender. But how can it be reached? 
How ca'n the weakling, the drunkard, the degen- 
erate be made to thrill again with the fire which 
flamed through them in youth? One can strike 
a spark from steel and stone, but not from wet 
clay or porridge. "Morale" is a word made 
popular by journalists in war-time. Morale is 
that feeling of never give up throbbing through 
an army. What is the quickest way of restoring 
morale to a routed army, of making the dis- 
integrated particles swing backward to the 
fight, like magnetized iron filings pointing one 
way? The magnetic influence to remake an 
army is a leader, a personality. The history 
of the world has many instances of defeat 
turned to victory by the inspiring leader. A 
good priest in England visited a reformed 
drunkard every day for six weeks to keep alive 
within his battling soldier the spirit of no sur- 
render. 



80 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

The small army of twelve which set out to 
conquer a world with the not very consoling 
standard of a Cross would have been beaten 
before the first engagement, had not every 
heart been warm with ardent devotion to Him 
Who had been the Good Shepherd when they 
were lost, and had been their generous Father 
when they were living afar riotously. It is love 
of another which keeps a weak woman from 
ever giving up; it was love of Christ which 
made the Apostles never give up, and it was 
love of us which made Calvary. 



THE SHORT WAY AROUND 



THE SHORT WAY AROUND 

WENDELL PHILLIPS was fond of 
telling the story of a certain Czar of 
Russia. Taking a map of his coun- 
try and pointing out to his engineers the two 
terminals of a proposed railroad, the Czar drew 
a straight line, let us say, from Retrograd to 
Tschaikowsky, and said: "There, build the road 
along that line." If every man had as many 
subjects as Russia and had the Czar's supreme 
power, we might abolish Institutes of Tech- 
nology and blue prints and elaborate specifica- 
tions, and teach civil engineering and surveying 
in one lesson by means of a ruler and a lead- 
pencil. Czars, however, are scarce; mountains 
are more amenable to dynamite than are men; 
at least, when they are blown down, mountains 
cannot stand up again. In a word, a straight 
line may mark the shortest distance between 
two points in geometry or in Russia, but wher- 

83 



84 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

ever you have to do with immortal souls, free 
wills, theoretical minds and dyspeptic stom- 
achs, then not rarely the cut across lots must be 
avoided, because the longest way around may 
be often the shortest way home. 

This process of indirection, as it might be 
termed, has been perfected by the Irish and by 
speakers, and especially by a perfect blend of 
the two. Alexander may swing a sword and 
sever the Gordian knot; modern Czars may 
build railroads by a ukase; the mailed fist of mil- 
itarism may hit out straight, but poverty, 
weakness, centuries of persecution must have 
recourse to other arts. Only one nation has a 
Blarney Castle; only one people has invented so 
many terms of endearment and words for the 
idea of taking a soul^not by storm — not by 
siege, but almost by surrender of the attacking 
party. When a person is said to be good at the 
comether, or to have a wheedling, cajoling, 
palavering and sootherin' way with him, every 
one knows his nationality. 

Public speaking is so weak in its instruments, 
having no sword or mailed fist, and public 
speaking is often so exorbitant in its demands, 
that it is no wonder it has made a special study 



THE SHORT WAY AROUND 85 

of the art of indirection. Speaking must achieve 
great results by weak means in a brief time. 
The art of rhetoric should be taught more 
widely, and many a good parish-priest would 
receive fewer criticisms if he had more rhetoric. 
His reproofs would be more effective because 
more prudent. His appeals for support would 
have, on his part, more encouragement, more 
eloquent gratitude, more kindly condescension, 
and— here's the point — more returns on the 
part of others. Yet it must be confessed that to 
insinuate one's way into a pocket book is harder 
than traveling in lower Belgium or upper 
France at this writing. Oratory can get a man's 
vices away from him more easily than it can get 
his money. 

Indirection is not necessarily unworthy toad- 
ying; neither does condescension always mean 
cunning. It is true that the first orators be- 
came the first sophists, and that rhetoric and 
even oratory may make a man suspect, as that 
famous adept in cleverness, Mark Antony, well 
knew when he styled himself no orator, but 
only a plain, blunt speaker. However, the 
plain, blunt speakers off the stage are usually 
the arrogant and offensive, who think polite- 



86 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

ness pettiness and condescension cowardice. 
The more delicate the machinery the more deli- 
cate should be the instrument to touch and 
handle it. Indirection takes a camel's-hair 
brush or a gentle breath to clean the works 
of a watch; bluntness would use a crowbar. 

Nothing is more delicate than the soul, noth- 
ing more sensitive than freedom. The soft 
answer is more potent than the thundering 
ukase. The blustering north wind was defeated 
in its efforts to tear away the traveler's cloak; 
a cheerful whisper from the south wind, out of a 
smiling sky, won the victory. It was the gentle 
patience of a young religious which mastered 
a crowd of unruly boys when stronger, more 
irascible disciplinarians were unsuccessful. 
What is the best so-called psychotherapy but 
indirection reduced to a fine art? 



CHIVALRY STILL PASSING 



CHIVALRY STILL PASSING 

THE age of chivalry has passed." Who 
will estimate the number of times ora- 
tory has given voice to these words? If 
any one has gone through that calculation, let 
him add now one more time to that number. 
It is not the coming of woman's suffrage which 
has elicited this latest elegy of ours over the 
tomb of chivalry. Some, indeed, have so la- 
mented. We believe that that particular la- 
ment is premature. The privilege of casting a 
vote, whether denied or granted, will make little 
difference in the world except to give the voting 
machine more work to do. Chivalry will not be 
harmed in any event by the tremendous conces- 
sion of being allowed to augment the flock of 
sheep, already too large. Chivalry has kept 
rigorously away from election booths ever since 
the Athenians so magnanimously voted Aris- 

tides into exile, because they were tired of hear- 
89 



90 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

ing him called just. Those who never have felt 
like taking another down a peg when they 
heard him praised, will be authorized to think 
that woman's suffrage would have enthroned 
chivalry in the election booth of ancient Attica. 

Yet despite all the numerous passings of 
chivalry, it had not hitherto wholly left man's 
heart and perhaps chivalry is still there, certain 
evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. 
Chivalry used to be in its glory on the battle- 
field. Modern science has made war brutal and 
gross, robbing it of the grace and beauty with 
which chivalry tried to vest it. The medieval 
knight, like the melodramatic villain, might be 
forced to kill, but he would do so politely; he 
"might be a murderer, but he would not fail to 
be a gentleman." Bayard would have clasped 
hands gladly with that modern commander 
who cried out in the hour of victory, "Don't 
cheer, boys; they are dying." The combatants 
in the battles of our day have still a like chiv- 
alry, but what of those not fighting? What 
would chivalry think of the size of the souls of 
the Sussfluss Angle-worm Club, which unani- 
mously passed a resolution to change their 
name to the "Sussfluss Fish- worm Club," and 



CHIVALRY STILL PASSING 91 



advocated hereafter the use of "corner" to 
express the idea of an aperture between two 
lines? Or what of the Jolibeau Association 
for Medical Research, which imposed upon its 
members the solemn duty of using the word, 
"parasite," instead of the obnoxious and 
deadly "germ"? The people that fight such 
battles are not the brave fellows who must un- 
happily kill onp another and have respect for 
courageous foes, but the stay-at-homes who 
take the field against languages. These gallant 
warriors charge manfully against vocabularies, 
cut to pieces geographical and street-names, 
reconquer foods and drinks from hostile termi- 
nology. Enemies of the Pan-Celtic movement 
refuse to pronounce the first syllable of maca- 
roni. Those who wish to check the insidious 
advances of the Pan-Italic civilization will 
transfer the final letter to the beginning of the 
word. Then the chivalrous Celt will be able, 
without demeaning himself, to pronounce such 
words as Bolano, Bergamo and Bojano. If we 
laugh at the middle ages for their minute meta- 
physics, what of the guffaws that now fill the 
vast chambers of the dead, when they hear of 
our magnificent achievements in logomachy? 



92 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

Has chivalry gone, too, from the souls of 
men? There are other laughs echoing with 
more discordant reverberations in the regions 
where ordinarily there is no sound but "weep- 
ing and gnashing of teeth." What are those 
laughs, not heard by human ears, but gloated 
over and recorded in "exterior darkness"? The 
gratification of a spite, the petty triumphs of 
jealousy, the silent exultation at a neighbor's 
downfall, the secret rejoicing over an ambush 
successfully "sprung" upon a rival, the keen 
satisfaction experienced in the assassination of a 
character, these are the sardonic smiles of the 
heart, these are the leering looks of Satan which 
start out of the white background of the spirit 
in the photo-plays of the soul. The age of 
chivalry has, indeed, passed for so ignoble a 
one as that, and his angel who sees his Father's 
face in heaven is not rejoicing. # To restrain a 
cheer when another is dying is high chivalry; to 
laugh in the heart at another's ruin is diablerie. 



ANTIPATHY AND SYMPATHY 



ANTIPATHY AND SYMPATHY 
i NTIPATHY is mysterious in its origin. 



Why is it we do not like Doctor Fell? 



"The reason why we cannot tell," says 
the old rhyme, but there is no doubt about the 
feeling. Antipathy is like tastes for certain 
foods, or like prejudices for or against national- 
ities. Touching a dry sponge, or cutting a dry 
cork, or scratching a slate-pencil on a slate, are 
for some people so many ways of making them 
feel like pincushions for icicles. That creeping, 
crawling sensation is called goose-flesh. Antip- 
athy is goose-flesh of the soul. It is upon deli- 
cate organisms that antipathy exerts its great- 
est force. Some are so callous that their sensi- 
tiveness seems protected by an alligator hide. 
They are all heel, while others are all sole, and 
go into hysterics if touched by a feather. The 
great Cardinal Newman was so sensitive that 
he appeared to wear his skin outside of his 
clothes. 




95 



96 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

Antipathy is no light matter in life, and 
deems no place sacred. It not only stops hands 
across the sea from clasping; it will not let 
hands clasp across the counter. Ribbons won't 
look at Bows in the Department Store. Cous- 
ins take opposite sides of the street while 
antipathy walks on the trolley-tracks. It is 
the voice of Clarinda which makes her sister 
Claribel wince; and Claribel's walk is some- 
thing which Clarinda simply cannot stand. 
Our age is famous, or rather infamous, for two 
discoveries, nerves and the divorce court, and 
those two discoveries reveal to us the world's 
immense supply of antipathy. Even the 
habit of the religious is not proof against the 
shafts of antipathy. One special reason for 
believing that monasteries are guarantees of 
a short purgatory is the large amount of 
antipathy religious life sutlers patiently and 
conquers successfully. The closer the rough 
surfaces the greater the friction. "See how 
they love one another" made converts to early 
Christianity. From that principle and that 
fact we conclude that the community life of 
the Catholic Church ought to convert the 
world. 



ANTIPATHY AND SYMPATHY 97 

Antipathy comes from the Greek, and it is 
a word which may be freely translated, friction 
of the soul. Fortunately when we imported 
antipathy we brought in, too, its natural 
enemy. Sympathy also comes from the Greek, 
and it can be said to mean oil of the soul. 
Sympathy can remove in an instant all horrors 
of antipathy. Sympathy will shear the fret- 
ful porcupine of its bristling quills. It was 
sympathy in the mother frog which induced her 
in the old fable to enter her child in a beauty- 
show. Sympathy cannot see the spots on the 
sun, because its sensitive eyes grow misty and 
tearful in the brilliancy it beholds. Sympathy 
is like a good appetite, where one has a fastid- 
ious taste. A starving man forgets his delicate 
tastes; a sympathetic man forgets all antip- 
athies. Sympathy invites a tramp into its 
department Store and turns him out bathed, 
shaved, clothed and blooming as proudly as a 
bridegroom. 

It is a mistake to think antipathy is neces- 
sarily a vice or a fault. Feeling is not willing. 
Antipathy is more frequently the fuel which 
feeds the flame of virtue; it is often the ad- 
mission price you must pay for enduring 



98 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

friendship; it is the roughness and the bitter- 
ness of the rind which sympathy throws away 
to keep the luscious fruit. If close proximity 
develops antipathy among men, you may 
estimate the length, width, breadth and depth 
of that divine sympathy which overcame the 
immense antipathies arising between such in- 
finitely opposed and incompatible objects as 
God and man, and brought them together in 
most intimate union. "The Word was made 
flesh and dwelt among us." 



ARE YOU DOING IT YOURSELF? 



ARE YOU DOING IT YOURSELF? 

IS the doctor in?" asked the patient who 
was taking a treatment guaranteed to 
cure him of hay-fever. "No," replied the 
office-boy, "he has gone to the mountains to 
get over his annual attack of hay-fever." Pro- 
fession and practice are poles apart, this disap- 
pointed patient might have muttered, and he 
would not be giving forth a profoundly original 
remark. It is to be hoped, however, that his 
sad experience may not set him on the road to 
cynicism, which believes all to be hypocrites 
except cynics. "Are you doing it yourself?" 
says the cynic in the classroom when his pro- 
fessor recommends highly a course in Plato 
and Aristotle, or wide reading in Shakespeare 
and Milton. "Are you doing it yourself?" 
thinks the cynic in the pew when the preacher 
points out certain paths not graced with prim- 
roses. Cynicism it is which equips every 
101 



102 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

family-closet with a skeleton and loves either 
to catch glimpses of its bare bones beneath the 
finery of the Easter parade or to detect its 
hideous grin lurking behind the lavish smiles 
worn by husband and wife at their public 
receptions. It was a cynic who wagered to 
prove his skeleton-theory true in the case of 
the most respectable man in town, and won 
his wager when the respectable man decamped 
for parts unknown upon receiving from the 
cynic a forged telegram: "All is discovered," 
signed, "A Friend." 

It is probable that the cynic himself is not 
living in an impenetrable and impregnable 
fortress. Very often his own cheap goods are 
on public view in the front-window, behind 
very transparent and very fragile glass, when, 
for the benefit of others, he adds an extra 
wrinkle to his nose and puts a sharper edge on 
his sneering laugh. Every reader of Newman's 
"Apologia" was mightily pleased when his 
critic was shown to be guilty of the very fault 
of which he had falsely accused Newman. 
Hypocrisy is a sad defect and perhaps all too 
common, but cynicism has not its cure. The 
cynic's lancet is not sterilized. 



ARE YOU DOING IT YOURSELF? 103 

Much of what the cynic carps at is not real 
hypocrisy; in most cases it is self-deception. 
Advertising always takes the most roseate 
view of things, and a man wonders why the 
makers of patent medicines should ever get 
sick or lose their hearing or hair or ever die. 
How many instances of discrepancy between 
practice and profession are due to deception, 
arising from the enthusiasm of the advertising 
a man deals out to himself? We have here 
another case of psychological falsehood. It 
has been argued that he who says that he 
understands but cannot explain a certain 
point has a consciousness which lies to his 
personality. In the same way consciousness 
has so subtle a way of advertising to a person 
his own perfections and of failing to note short- 
comings that the unhappy personality does 
not behold the yawning chasm between what 
it professes for others and practices for itself. 
This whole truth, which we have been discuss- 
ing so elaborately, might be briefly stated thus: 
The mystery of the Man with the Iron Mask 
is exemplified daily in the case of many mortals, 
who have never scanned the features of their 
own souls. How can they be expected to see 



104 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

a mote in their soul's eye, when they cannot see 
any eye at all? "Are you doing it yourself?" 
you inquire. "We don't need to," they an- 
swer. "What a funny name, Oh-hah-rah!" 
said a man. "And what's your own?" in- 
quired O'Hara. "Bunghorst," was the com- 
placent reply. 

There is a school of historians which has been 
printing what they call the "True Lives" of 
various celebrities of the past. They take 
particular delight in brushing aside the reti- 
cence of earlier biographies. They burrow 
down and ferret out their subjects in their 
grub state, not in their freedom when they had 
lifted themselves on resplendent wings into 
light and sunshine. These cynics of history 
think that "dead selves" upon which men and 
women have arisen to higher things are the 
only true selves. The Sinner Magdalen, the 
Sinner Augustine, replace the former titles of 
Saint in their biographies. Long, long ago 
the Roman satirist proclaimed that the laugh 
of cynicism came easy. Cynicism never sets 
a mirror up for the soul to see itself; the mock- 
ing laugh blinds instead of purging the sight. 
While waiting for the day of General Judgment, 



ARE YOU DOING IT YOURSELF? 105 

when Infinite Justice will lift the mask of 
hypocrisy from the world, a little humility 
may prompt each to say: "Perhaps I am not 
doing it myself, and so I must be patient with 
every one else." 



IF I WERE YOU 



IF I WERE YOU 
UT yourself in his place. It is a healthy 



and holy exercise. You will find it 



harder than you imagine. You must 
be willing to leave the contented home in which 
you now live and go into a strange land. You 
are satisfied with your own views of things. 
You might like to have another's lungs, liver 
or digestive apparatus, but what of an exchange 
of your likes and dislikes for his? They are 
the chains which hold in check many a man 
who has an idea of faring forth from his own 
place and occupying another's. Then, again, 
you will be going to a place where a foreign 
language is spoken when you endeavor to put 
yourself in his place. A red flag is a red flag 
in the dictionary, but it does not mean the same 
to a bull and a bullfrog. It is a challenge to 
the one and a charm to the other. In the 
dictionaries of the soul, where definitions have 




109 



110 



CHAFF AND WHEAT 



been made by life and experience, no two 
words mean the same. Home is translated 
heaven by you, but home may be translated 
otherwise in his place. Philosophers have held 
that no two angels are alike. You will ap- 
preciate that truth when you try to get into 
his place. In the sum total of all they have 
experienced and are, no two souls are alike. 

You begin to see why putting oneself in 
another's place is not a popular form of amuse- 
ment. Great actors give a lifetime to the 
study of some dramatic character which they 
are to impersonate. Not all are complete suc- 
cesses at such interpretations. Insight is lack- 
ing or sufficient sympathy or adaptability. 
"How can we get papa out of that little hole?" 
inquired a child anxiously of her mother, on 
hearing her father over the telephone. It is 
the opposite problem which confronts you when 
you try to put yourself into another's place. 
How can I get into that hole? And in a true 
sense you never can. The insistent tide pushes 
its way into bays and creeks and recesses; the 
air presses down on the world and fills every 
nook and cranny; ether with more imperious 
pressure goes where water and air cannot go 



IF I WERE YOU 111 

and swathes and permeates the universe, but 
however close all these widespread elements 
come to what they engulf, they have yet only 
put themselves around or near another's place, 
not in it. 

"If I were you," says old wisdom to young 
ardor. "But you are not," replies young 
ardor, "and you never can be because you have 
forgotten what you were at my age." "If I 
were you," says the teacher to the pupil. 
"But you are not and cannot be," replies the 
pupil. "You had dreams once of what you 
would say and do to pupils when you were a 
pupil and had at the time an unsympathetic, 
isolated and insulated teacher. You failed to 
note down your grand program for the amelio- 
ration of the tutorial department of life, and 
now it is too late. You have gone far away 
from his place and do not know the way back. 
And you really don't want to come back or 
recall what you would now term the callow, 
Utopian dreams of unsophisticated experience." 

Alas ! That it should be so ! We often say, 
"If I were you," but we mean, "If you were I." 
Selfishness, prejudices, antipathies of all kinds, 
national jealousies, professional jealousies, fam- 



112 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

ily jealousies, these and a hundred other busy- 
agents, are at work intrenching themselves 
with barriers never dreamt of in the most 
deadly and ingenious warfare. You are you 
and I am I, and a lifetime of siege cannot 
carry either impregnable fortress. 

The supposition "If I were you" is in- 
capable of full realization and often has an 
echo or undertone of arrogance. "If you were 
I" is a better supposition, because you know 
fairly well your place, and you know what 
you would like others to say and do to you. 
Act towards others as though they were 
another you, and you will find that you and 
they differ, indeed, as the angels are said to 
do, yet you will discover, too, that both you 
and they, with all your idiosyncrasies (See the 
doctor at once!) have a common nature, which 
is angelic. 

He who gave us the Golden Rule, of which 
you have just had another version, performed 
the most stupendous of all miracles to break 
down an infinite chasm of separation which lay 
between divinity and humanity, and the ap- 
proachableness of the Word made flesh filled 
the early Christians with wonder. "That 



IF I WERE YOU 113 

which was from the beginning," they cried, 
"we have heard, we have seen with our eyes 
and our hands have handled." No one has 
ever tried so marvelously to put himself in 
another's place and no one has succeeded so 
infinitely well as "He who was from the 
beginning." 



SAINTS MADE WHILE YOU WAIT 



SAINTS MADE WHILE YOU WAIT 



making a saint is a long and expensive one. 
The chief requisite is that you must be dead 
fifty years. Other difficult requisites are a 
host of witnesses to bear testimony to your 
heroic virtues and an officer, in whose duties 
we are all expert from daily practice, but who 
makes it hard for candidates of sanctity to 
escape his rake and finer-toothed comb and 
dissecting blade and high-power microscope. 
This dexterous official with the surgeon's case 
is the advocatus diaboli, styled in the President's 
English, the devil's advocate. Now in olden 
days the people made saints, as they made 
bishops and popes, by acclamation, or if they 
did not make them, they nominated them, and 
left it to the proper authority to ratify their 
choice. People every day block the canoniza- 




E sometimes hear, "She is a saint," 
and, alas, more rarely, "He is a 
saint." The regular process of 



117 



118 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

tion of so many saints that it is too bad the 
opposite process is not encouraged more. 

"Let the people make saints," is a good cam- 
paign cry to go to the country with. " Canonized 
in America" should be a popular trademark. 
Of course there will be certain necessary quali- 
fications, but we must not be too exacting. 
The people's standard of sanctity is high al- 
ready. Men and women do not rush into 
conversation with the cry, "That's a saint!" 
But if any one declares, "She never says a 
word against a single person," "That will 
do," is the unanimous cry, "Canonize her." 
Next! "He never yet looked around before 
speaking to see whether any ladies were 
present." "Canonized!" say all. The people 
judge the health of the soul and its sanctity, 
as doctors judge the health of the body, by 
looking at the tongue, and in the case of the 
soul the test works better. 

Keeping it up is another school for saints. 
We propose some candidates whose persever- 
ance merits perhaps the degree. Here is a 
weak woman, looks fifty but is not near it, 
has been nursing a sick father who is helpless 
as a child but not as easily helped; works every 



SAINTS MADE WHILE YOU WAIT 119 

day in a factory, is alone, except when bothered 
by a worse than helpless brother. What do 
you think? Had we not better call her, say, 
Saint Alpha Aquilae : that is, a star of the first 
magnitude. Here is candidate number two, 
already canonized by his mother, who gives the 
testimony. Deponent states that her son is 
now over thirty, he does not drink; smokes 
occasionally but not to hurt any one; has never 
been known to swear, has to work on Sunday 
and cannot, unhappily, go often to Mass; has 
given to herself, the mother, his pay-envelope, 
every week of his life, with his whole pay- 
Enough! Let him in at once and call him Saint 
Multiplicand, and let the nuns have a new 
name so that they won't have to be going back 
to Egypt for titles, calling themselves, Sister 
Psammitichus or the like. Here is the last 
candidate offered to-day: She is the mother 
of ten children. Hold! Her process of canon- 
ization is over; chant the Iste Confessor. 
What's that? The devil's advocate objects: 
"She was not present at the Euchre and Dance 
for Nativity Parish." "Why, Mr. Advocate, 
she made the parish." Objection is at once 
withdrawn. 



120 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

This is a test of a true saint. He never 
knows he is one although the whole world 
unites in considering him a saint. Tell any 
of the above that they are doing something 
extraordinary, and they will not believe it. 
They are doing nothing at all, they feel, and 
will continue to do nothing at all until St. Peter 
closes and locks the gates of heaven behind 
them. Then, looking around, they will inquire 
in amazement, "When did we do anything to 
deserve this?" 

It may be objected that this new process of 
canonization acts too swiftly. We do not 
think so. Saints may be made in a second. 
One great sinner had seven devils exorcised 
with one word, "because she loved much"; 
another sinner was dismissed forgiven, to sin 
no more, "because no one condemned her"; 
another was sanctified by a look; another, a 
robber and a murderer, was canonized as he 
was put to death for his crimes. No, the 
process is not too swift. Volunteers are 
wanted. As you go through the parish here- 
after, canonize a saint at every house. There 
will be devil's advocates enough, don't you 
fear, to delay the process. 



CARRYING HIS POINT 



CARRYING HIS POINT 
STUDENT was determined to worst his 



rival and let everybody think it was 



done easily. He flung himself into all 
the sports and amusements while the rival kept 
steadily at his books. But when all were 
asleep, the reckless, unconcerned athlete arose 
and stole from the night the hours of study 
which a petty vanity would not give during the 
day. This is no fable but a fact. "I ruined 
my eyesight and injured my health and in 
general made a fool of myself," said the night- 
student, but despite his contrition, there was 
a ring of exultancy perceptible in his tone, as 
he continued, "I won the prize, however, and 
I carried my point." In many respects the 
phrase is an appropriate one. Carrying one's 
point represents an immense amount of toil 
for an insignificant trifle of results. To carry 
a point is like unlimbering a battery to swat a 




124 



CHAFF AND WHEAT 



fly. The wife carries her point, and the 
lamp-shade of red instead of yellow is finally 
purchased and waves anarchistic defiance ever 
after in a once happy home. The husband 
carries his point and has, as he conceives, 
effected admirable order at the dinner-table by 
creating remarkable disorder in chastened chil- 
dren, rebuked servants, and humiliated wife. 

Most of the point-carrying rampant in our 
unregenerate world is plain, ordinary selfish- 
ness, or militant pride masquerading as strength 
of character and lofty assertion of one's rights. 
The little boy who said to his little sister on 
the hobby horse, ' 1 If one of us got down, there 
would be more room for me," succeeded in 
carrying his point and riding his hobby, but 
the ostentatious disinterestedness of his sup- 
position does not completely disguise the 
opposite tendency of his conclusion. It may 
be doubted whether the poor, sneaking satis- 
faction which a man hugs to his soul and over 
which he smacks his lips is really any lasting 
gratification when he looks back on the smoking 
ruins along the path he has carried his point. 
It was a donkey in the old story that would 
not heed the restraining rein and insisted upon 



CARRYING HIS POINT 125 

making for the precipice. The abused master 
finally helped the beast over the cliff. On the 
other hand a door-mat or porridge would not 
be considered adept at carrying a point. But 
the great Father Tom Burke laid down as the 
ideal religious — perhaps too excessive for ordi- 
nary mortals: "Be as humble as a door-mat 
and as pliable as porridge." 

"You carried your point," mutters the auto- 
mobilist who has been left the dust, and in the 
rear, and now sees the ambulance coming back 
with the successful speeder. "You carried 
your point," decides the court in the success- 
ful law-suit, which breaks up a family, rends 
hearts, disgraces an honorable past, and 
blackens a hopeless future with undying hate. 
"You carried your point," declares the in- 
finitely Just Judge, as He gazes sadly on the 
disastrous abuse of His precious gift of free 
will, an abuse marring His sublime handiwork 
by mean and minute pertinacity. "You car- 
ried your point," echoes the keeper of the outer 
darkness, "and now having carried your point, 
you lose all else. There is a place prepared 
for you." 

Peace hath her victories, yea, and retreat 



126 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

and surrender and soft answers and conde- 
scension. He who loses his point shall gain it. 
It was a modern madman who invented the 
superman, and a modern zany who dramatized 
the superman. The reformed gospel of dis- 
eased philosophy or topsy-turvy buffoonery is 
no satisfactory substitute for the gospel of the 
supreme man and of divine paradox: "The 
last shall be first." The superman shall be the 
infra-man. 



DOES IT PAY? 



DOES IT PAY? 



OT many years ago a historian, or rather 



a man who wrote a history, taking a 



comprehensive view of Christianity, ex- 
pressed his surprise at the fact that the Catholic 
Church was continually beginning new religious 
orders. The old orders grow rich, lose their 
spirit and efficiency, and then comes another 
return to poverty and austerity. This process 
is a weakness according to the professor who 
wrote a history. It is indeed a confession of 
the weakness of human nature, but it is an 
exhibition of strength in the Church. To 
meet the same disease with the same effective 
remedy, shows wisdom on the part of the 
physician. To cure human ills with the 
remedy prescribed by Christ, manifests divine 
wisdom in Christianity. When the whole 
world is run on a financial basis, when "Does 
it pay?" is the eternal question of the human 




129 



130 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

race, it is courageous and bracing and im- 
mensely uplifting to have a few take literally 
the invitation : " Go; sell all thou hast and give 
to the poor." 

The dollar is a precious thing. At an auc- 
tion you would rate the value of an article very 
high, if you saw a thousand bidding for it. 
How many hands are now reached out, yearn- 
ing for the dollar around which your enamored 
fingers cling? Wife and child and school and 
church and taxes and comrades and a host of 
others are bidding fast and furious for that 
precious coin. In what direction can it roll? 
A sphere represents the most unstable equilib- 
rium. A sphere rests on one point and waits 
but a touch to speed in any one of a countless 
number of ways. Down all those ways your 
precious dollar may roll. Yet despite its un- 
stable equilibrium the dollar resists the touch. 
The earth, the sun, the moon and the other 
great spheres with all their possible ways of 
travel keep faithfully to their allotted paths 
under the sway of gravity. Your dollar holds 
back, too, and gravity must modestly retire to 
an inferior position when compared with the 
mighty force which clings to a dollar and which 



DOES IT PAY? 131 

may be summed up in the fateful words, "Does 
it pay?" 

"Does it pay?" is the highwayman on life's 
broad roads. Every one must stand and de- 
liver at his imperious commands. Not the 
rich only but the poor, too; not the strong 
simply but widows and orphans. Some brig- 
ands had a sort of chivalry like that of the 
burglar, not so long since, who entered a house 
to rob it but, finding in it only a poor, sick 
woman, gave her a contribution and departed. 
"Does it pay?" knows no chivalry. Let this 
question of Mammon echo persistently in the 
soul behind every word and act and thought 
and desire, and that soul becomes as merciless 
as it is mercenary. Friendship and the love 
of kin and the worship of God and high honor 
and conscience, all must cash in to the monster 
Mammon, and his one, unvarying question. 
"A blaze in the east, a blaze overhead, a blaze 
in the west," so appeared the tropical sun to 
the poet. The blaze which makes its dazzling 
track across the sky of the soul-miser, the blaze 
which blinds his eyes to all else, is that orb of 
gold whose dawn is red, whose noon-day is 
deadly and whose setting is bloody. The 



132 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

mighty dollar is the center of the soul system 
where "Does it pay?" is master. "Does it 
pay? " is the single standard of gold which rules 
and ruins the noblest. 

There is one consolation. The world hates 
a miser. Treating and the giving of useless 
presents are indeed abuses, but they have their 
good points. They are often the tribute miser- 
liness pays to human respect. It takes nearly 
the unanimous scorn of the human race to pry 
open the purse of "Does it pay?" We recom- 
mend this tyranny to the consideration of the 
socialistic state and ask it, when it is finally 
established, to make Santa Claus a cabinet 
officer in charge of the Department of Treating 
and Gifts. Nay rather, as you have made 
your soul a den of thievery with that foul 
robber, "Does it pay?" at the gateway, pray 
and get your friends to pray for the cleansing 
lash of the poor man of Nazareth. Then we 
shall need no socialistic state. 



AGREEING TO DIFFER 



AGREEING TO DIFFER 

I REPEAT and insist on it, and that settles 
it; 'The number of stars is odd.' " "Well, 
if you will not listen to reason, I most em- 
phatically disagree with you. Any and every 
school-boy and school-girl is well aware of the 
fact that the number of the stars is even." 
You need no vast amount of experience to tell 
where this conversation took place and what 
stage it had reached. Think a moment. 
Didn't this tremendous discussion upon the 
exact calculation of the stars happen recently 
to some one, not unknown to you? Do you 
wish to read a communique on the subsequent 
history of this famous encounter? The com- 
batants went down into the trenches, sur- 
rounded themselves with barbed- wire entangle- 
ments and discharged shots at random into the 
impenetrable darkness that lay between the 
opposing lines, 

135 



136 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

Of course, the only purpose of these mobilized 
disputants was to safeguard and advance as- 
tronomy. Imperialism never goes unmasked. 
It is taking up the white man's burden, or 
spreading culture, or upbuilding civilization, or 
abrogating peonage, or nailing up the flag, or 
modestly seeking a place in the sun, or obeying 
the dictates of manifest destiny. These are 
the inspiring words emblazoned upon the ban- 
ners which float above the wars of imperial- 
ism. So above the conflicts of controversy, 
truth, science, progress, amelioration of man- 
kind, spread of enlightenment, are the heralded 
mottoes, while all the time, below the clash of 
man with man, there rages a sub-conscious 
duel where personalities parry and thrust until 
after a time the paramount claims of astronomy 
yield to mutual accusations of asininity. 

But why not be content to let insoluble ques- 
tions remain unsolved? In the realms of 
fashion, whatever may be said of the monotony 
and ugly uniformity of men's head-gear, no 
fault can be found with the beauty and per- 
petual variety of bonnets. You are rather 
pleased that the outside of another's head is 
unlike yours, why should you feel like a sub- 



AGREEING TO DIFFER 137 

marine, cruising around to discharge a tor- 
pedo, because some one has not made the inside 
of the head like yours? Why should the hold- 
ing of an opposite opinion constitute a per- 
petual grievance ? To a burglar bars are a 
challenge, burglar-alarms an insult, and safes 
a constant menace to his content, but normal 
individuals pass by a bank without any impair- 
ing of their appetites. Who was it that ad- 
vanced the theory that the complexion of our 
colored brethren is only an enlarged freckle, 
become conterminous with the corporal super- 
ficies, instead of beautifying the tip of the nose? 
The imperialistic tendency of freckles was de- 
veloped in torrid zones. Is it not equally 
imperialistic to stretch an idea so far as to wish 
to have all minds draped in the dull hues of 
that one idea? Would you think of wishing to 
impose your Ethiopian views on a Caucasian 
friend unless you, like the original African 
freckle, were at the moment inhabiting a torrid 
zone? 

"The number of stars is odd!" "The num- 
ber of stars is even!" Very well, let it go at 
that! Let the mercury not rise over the 
difference. Imitate the thrifty farmer who 



138 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

wouldn't allow his son to use the parlor ther- 
mometer for taking the outside temperature 
through fear of wearing out the tube. The 
wear and tear of human thermometers, subject 
to variations in heat, is much greater. "We 
agree to differ" is a phrase which puts its 
maker among the benefactors of mankind. It 
supplies a foretaste of the millennium where 
the lamb lies down beside, rather than inside, 
the lion, to which the lamb in rougher days 
would be assimilated. Bring submarines to the 
surface; let the snipers climb out of the trench, 
we agree to differ, instead of trying to reduce 
one another to the likeness of death and dust. 
Husband and wife, parent and child, brother 
and sister, man and woman, everybody, have 
you heard the good news? "We agree to 
differ." Come in and sit down to dinner. 
"We agree to differ," is a sweet, melodious, 
harmonizing dinner-bell. 



MICROMETER OR MEGAPHONE? 
WHICH? 



MICROMETER OR MEGAPHONE? 
WHICH? 



mites, motes, molecules and of things 
still smaller. All made of hard metal, no pos- 
sibility of expansion. It will tell you the exact 
width of a hair. What fraction of an inch can 
it gauge? Why, this one will estimate ac- 
curately one ten-thousandth part of an inch. 
Rather minute, eh? But there is a special 
make which goes into still finer things. Yes, it 
can see too, but, of course, the micrometer- 
screw has a limited horizon. No vistas, pano- 
ramas or bird's-eye views, but when it comes to 
concentration of vision and the descrying of 
infinitesimals, it is splendid. Here you have 
the eye of the micrometer-screw, called the 
micrometer-ocular. We are making microm- 
eters now so that you can carry them around. 
Shall I fit you out with one?" 




HAT? That's a micrometer-screw, a 
measurer of little things, midgets, 



141 



142 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

"That other instrument? Why, you know 
that. 'Tis only a new form of the megaphone. 
The old-time megaphones have all been bought 
up by college students and guides in the sight- 
seeing cars. This is a vast improvement. It 
may not be popular on the grandstand because 
it does not split the air with thunders. The 
special improvements are a device for directing 
the sound, and another for eliminating all 
harsh or disagreeable noises. For example, 
you go to the theater and you wish to applaud 
with discrimination. While others are making 
a din and filling the ears of the poor actors with 
applause, deserved only by one or a few, you 
whisper into your megaphone, ' Well done, 
Othello'; ' Rosalind, you have been magnifi- 
cent.' 'You are the best grave-digger I have 
ever seen.' Your message goes direct to the 
proper ear, and you are rewarded with a thank- 
ful smile, and your memory is embalmed in 
unforgetting gratitude. This one, you see, 
will not transmit hisses or boos or cat-calls. 
Won't you take a melodious megaphone, this 
year's model?" 

As you leave this Novelty Store with its 
wonderful instruments, you may wonder at 



MICROMETER OR MEGAPHONE? 143 

the mysteries of science, but unless you are 
vastly different from the rest of mankind, you 
will find promptings and impulses and unholy 
tendencies which would outrival the achieve- 
ments of the micrometer. Is there anything 
which limits the horizon of the soul? Is there 
anything which may cause the soul to imagine 
it is broad when it is really magnifying petty 
things? Are there human beings who feel 
starved when a crumb goes to another, who 
begrudge their neighbors a few drops of love 
when they have had the draught, whose eye- 
sight is so keen that a barely visible scratch 
assumes the dimensions of a gash or the depths 
and torment of a major surgical operation? 
Has any one ever had to close his ears to the 
reiteration of a maddening tune, "That was 
never done for me"? Answer these questions 
and perhaps you will see that you need not 
enter the Novelty Store to buy a micrometer. 
Jealousy is more microscopic, micrometric, 
more metallic and less expansive than any 
machine of human invention. 

Ah, but do buy that latest model megaphone 
that has a silencer for harsh sounds and a 
magnifier for sweet sounds. The world needs 



144 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

that whisper of praise which is enlarged in the 
soul to a trumpet-blast, filling and inspiring 
the hearer. The comrade in the ranks would 
be thrilled to mighty deeds and lifted on wings 
by the touch of a fellow-soldier. A glance of 
approval may be the spark of a conflagration. 
A smile may be in some glowing heart, the first 
beam of a polar-dawn and a long polar-day. 
A megaphone differs from a funnel. The 
megaphone broadens its little contents to pour 
them whole in a generous flood upon the world; 
the funnel shrinks its contents and would nar- 
row the universe until it trickles in a tiny 
thread into self. Encouragement is a sovereign 
remedy for jealousy. An enterprising printer 
recently issued this advertisement: Sell your 
hammer and buy a horn. It is regularly 
moved and seconded that the proposal be 
amended to read: Sell your micrometer and 
buy a megaphone, a large durable one, with a 
silencer for harsh sounds and a magnifier for 
sweet sounds. The world will profit by the 
purchase: two souls will grow in love and hap- 
piness, yours and your neighbor's. 



TREMENDOUSNESS OF TRIFLES 



TREMENDOUSNESS OF TRIFLES 



HIS is an age of gigantic achievement 



because it is an age of research and dis- 



covery in the minute. Science teaches 
the tremendous importance of little things. 
"The truths," said a serious writer recently, 
"upon which our scientists will base to-mor- 
row's progress in the adaptation of scientific 
fact to human need lie beyond a millionth of 
an inch, beyond the millionth part of an 
ounce, beyond the millionth part of a degree 
of temperature." A shiver traced here in a 
delicate line on a seismometer means 10,000 
lives lost, 1,000 miles away. There is a thin, 
faint shadow in the spectrum; you have located 
a floating gold mine in the sun. With a micro- 
scope you can discover a scratch in a gutta- 
percha disk and you let the tiny point of a pin 
across that scratch, at once the blended har- 
mony of fifty instruments and fifty voices will 




147 



148 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

crash from your phonograph. You are as 
amazed when you realize the mightiness of 
the minute as the incredulous countryman 
who cried out, on first seeing a giraffe, "There 
ain't no such beast!" But science to confound 
your confusion multiplies her miniature won- 
ders. Science will weigh and number the 
particles which fly off from an almost invisible 
amount of perfume, still tickling delicate 
olfactory nerves after long lapses of time. The 
telephone, the telegraph, with or without wires, 
has grown great by little agitations. Bacilli 
have revolutionized medicine, given State 
legislatures an increase of work, "swatted" the 
fly, introduced paper-cups, and mobilized the 
world against the mosquito. Enough! Enough! 
The microscope is master of the world; trifles 
are triumphant. 

In the world of common-sense whose lan- 
guage is proverbs, the one reiterated lesson is 
the importance of the insignificant. Men need 
the lesson. Ask the ordinary reader who was 
Michaelangelo, and he will answer, "The man 
who said, 6 Perfection consists in trifles, but 
perfection is no trifle/ " These words have 
been quoted so often that the sculpture, paint- 



TREMENDOUSNESS OF TRIFLES 149 

ing and poetry of that famous man are threat- 
ened with extinction in the glory of an epigram. 
"Little drops of water, little grains of sand," 
"stitches in time," "many a mickle," "take 
care of the pence," "ounce of prevention," 
"little acorns," so speak the proverbs, voicing 
the common sense of mankind. Grammar 
dissects a word, rhetoric dilates on the ramifica- 
tions of one sentence, chemistry clings to a 
test-tube, physics revels in the threads of 
many colors, the actinic, heat, alpha, beta, 
gamma rays, which it finds in one sunbeam. 
The teachers of mind and manners must labori- 
ously insist upon the tremendousness of trifles. 
Pupils are restless; processes are slow; modern 
impatience awaits outside of the nursery with 
its vocational training. With one stride the 
baby must step from the crib into a cabinet 
office. Who will answer the bells in the 
socialistic state when all the boys will want to 
press the buttons? 

You may have read the sneers of those who 
mocked at the religious differences that arose 
in history over one letter and that letter the 
most insignificant in the Greek language. You 
will know now what to say to those shallow 



150 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

thinkers. You may have met with those who 
ride rough-shod over the kindly ways of life, 
the forms of politeness, the "thank you's," the 
passing congratulations, the smiling deference. 
You will know what to think of one who by 
such little rifts in the lute, makes all the music 
of civilized life grow mute. You may be 
tempted to say: "What's the harm"? " Tis 
only a little thing, and mothers are easily 
alarmed." Don't! Have you not read: "I 
did but taste a little honey with the end of 
the rod, and behold I must die"? A glance 
may ruin; so David will tell you; and a glance 
may lift to life again; so Peter will confess with 
tears in his eyes. 

Reduce a colored liquid to foam and it will 
be white. An ocean of ink would roll white 
breakers. May we not hope that the blackness 
of man, a tiny trifle before the white light of 
heaven, may lose its darkness in man's little- 
ness and lowliness and reflect the full resplen- 
dence of God's mercy? Humility will make a 
saint, and let us trust that the vast tide of 
stained souls shall by their minuteness break 
white about the throne of the Most High. 



BROAD OR NARROW? 



BROAD OR NARROW? 
LEARNED professor of chemistry, ex- 



plaining that iron became steel by being 



impregnated with carbon, went on to 
declare that a perfectly sharp razor would be 
one with a ridge of carbon atoms cresting its 
edge. Extravagant, you will say, though keen! 
But here is something more extravagant! 
There are people in this great world so narrow 
that if they walked on that razor they would 
not cut themselves. They have ions (ions are 
smaller than atoms) for feet, and the rest of 
their personality is in proportion. Is narrow- 
ness, then, so dread a vice as to strain thus the 
possibilities of hyperbole? 

What is broadness? Broadness is an angel 
of the choir of freedom. The path of a bullet 
should be straight and narrow; the tracks of a 
street-car are straight and unyielding and offer 
no opportunity for meandering. Narrowness 




153 



154 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

is a virtue in machinery. The broadness which 
induced a certain street-car driver to turn off 
the tracks and let a load of hay pass has found 
few imitators in the city where this fact is 
related, or anywhere else. Animals are fixed 
in their ways by instinct and by training, and 
with them, too, narrowness is a virtue. Science 
and all well-established truth are and must be 
narrow. A broad geometrician, a broad chem- 
ist, or the like, is a misnomer. It is not a 
virtue to consider that the moon is made of 
green cheese, but it is very broad ignorance. 
Every one except sceptics, and their latest 
offspring, idealists, pragmatists and creative- 
evolutionists, every one holds that truth is 
definite, restricting, limited, narrow. You 
cannot walk the line of truth with the uncer- 
tainty which characterized that Irish reveler 
who, in trying to make his native town, was 
more concerned, he said, with the width of 
the road than with its length. Broadness is 
a virtue where there is freedom to expand or 
contract. You can and ought to be broad 
where principles are not evident, where pre- 
cepts are not clearly obligatory, where prac- 
tice is not definitely prescribed. 



BROAD OR NARROW? 155 

Your theorist should be broad. He has in- 
deed his answers to a certain problem, but until 
he knows his answer is right he is narrow if he 
imposes his theory tyrannically upon all. The 
narrow theorist is really the enemy of truth and 
of science. If he goes further and tries to 
answer all questions by his formula, then he 
becomes a faddist. If he is persistent and 
peculiar with his fad, then he will be said to 
be riding a hobby, and a hobby-horse is narrow 
longitudinally as well as latitudinally; it has 
the magnificent area of a point. Be broad in 
the matter of fads and fashions and fancies; be 
narrow if you have facts. 

Broadness is a blend of humility, common- 
sense, unselfishness, magnanimity and sym- 
pathy. A man should not be broad on the 
Ten Commandments. They are clear, definite 
obligations. But if laws are narrow, love and 
mercy are broad, and no one should arrogate 
to himself the wisdom and power of Mount 
Sinai and hurl new tables of self-made laws 
at the heads of his neighbors. Spirit is broad, 
but flesh and appetite are narrow. Narrow- 
ness is short-sighted selfishness. To look for 
the trade-mark, "Made in Mylandia," may be 



156 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

good business, but it is not broadness if nation- 
alism or sectionalism or localism or domesticism 
will allow one to approve of nothing unless it 
has "Made in Mylandia" stenciled upon it. 
Your clock may sometimes tick so loud at 
night that you imagine it is telling time for the 
antipodes, the solar apogee or stellar space. 
It isn't. See a neurologist. 

Alas, during war-time, broadness is cribbed, 
cabined and confined. Acts, words, decisions, 
appreciations, tastes, go down into dark, 
cramped trenches. Standards and judgments 
are so narrow that pin-points afford ample 
space upon which to have them enjoy free 
exercise. Even Christianity with difficulty 
escapes the national brand. Some, no doubt, 
would be glad to haul down the Star of Bethle- 
hem and confine its broad rays to one mountain 
or one city. Not, however, on Gerizim of 
Samaria, or in Jerusalem only are found adorers 
in spirit and truth. Let spirit and truth see to 
it that there be no blockade zone to the noble 
virtue of broadness, that even under martial 
law freedom shall still be free and Catholicism 
remain steadfastly Catholic. 



MAKE-UPS 



MAKE-UPS 
EACHER, have you a boy who snarls 



out "Naw," instead of saying "No," 



who plunges his hands into his pockets, 
as though he was trying to dig a mine, who 
throws his chin out and his chest in, and who 
resents the correction of those and a number of 
other sad traits? He is an actor. He has put 
on that character before the audience of his 
block, and he is too cowardly to dare to be 
right. The gang will laugh if he drops his 
make-up. Experience in the classroom shows 
that a chief difficulty in all corrections is shame. 
The inventive ingenuity of man has devised 
many new and deadly explosives and many 
terrible engines for hurling them with dread 
accuracy, but all this destructive machinery 
has not yet attained to the fatal effectiveness of 
a laugh. Human respect is an army made up 
of the first-line troops of Satan, and its arma- 




159 



160 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

ment is a laugh. Your incorrigible pupil peers 
over his shoulder anxiously, cocks his ears 
fearfully; he shudders in anticipation of a vol- 
ley of cachinnations and refuses to be corrected. 

A recent catalogue advertised grease-paint 
at twenty-five cents per stick in a cardboard 
tube, and gave a long list of make-ups it was 
prepared to supply. Among the first on the 
list were the following : pale juvenile, very pale 
juvenile, juvenile hero-flesh, juvenile deeper 
shade, juvenile robust, sallow young man. All 
the schools exemplify these make-ups, but the 
price for such character make-ups is more than 
twenty-five cents per stick. The pale juvenile 
with his collar turned up and his shoulders 
hunched; the very pale juvenile, bearing the 
tell-tale 'yellow stains, he of the shifty glances; 
the juvenile hero-flesh, who apes his elders in 
swagger and profanity; the juvenile deeper 
shade, who haunts the back alleys and dodges 
the truant-officer; the juvenile robust, bragging 
and bullying and keeping late hours and rapidly 
degenerating into the anemic flabbiness of the 
sallow young man, all these you have seen; but 
did you ever think that much of this was make- 
up, the stage traditions of some crowd, the 



MAKE-UPS 161 

little impersonations before the little audiences 
of youth? The boy goes out a plain, ordinary, 
healthy boy, and he comes back a pale juvenile, 
or very pale juvenile, or dons one of the other 
make-ups which mark his entrance upon a 
larger life, and is his passport with the gang. 

Before you unmercifully berate the shame- 
faced lad who fears the laugh and dares not 
drop his make-up, take your own position 
before the glass and see whether you can behold 
there any make-ups at so many laughs a piece. 
You may find a faultlessly perfect exterior re- 
flected to your gaze; no swagger or slouch or 
shiftiness there, but what of the mind and soul? 
Any pale or sallow, or robust, or hero-flesh, 
laid on thick there? Some of the popular in- 
tellectual make-ups of the day, all very cheap, 
are: agnostic pose, Christian Science affecta- 
tion, irreligious braggadocio (given away with 
one work of Shaw's), evolutionary enlighten- 
ment, altitudinous thought and skeptic snob- 
bery (won as a premium on graduating from 
Piffley), the higher-criticism strut and the blase 
nonchalance of indifference. 

"But I can never give up evolution," as- 
serted a woman. "What fact, for example?" 



162 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

asked the priest. "What fact?" — There was 
a remover of make-up. — "What fact? Why, 
honestly, Father, I don't know of any, when I 
come to think of it." Her conversion followed. 
Evolution had been for her a bogey-man, a 
make-up which intellectual snobbery had 
smeared and sneered upon her soul. Evolution 
was like the fearsome polariscope which, ac- 
cording to a Texan politician, was threatening 
the farmers through the machinations of his 
wily opponent. "What is a polariscope?" 
asked his horrified audience. "You will know," 
replied the astute politician, "when you see 
your flocks of sheep laid low." 

Are you a teacher in Israel, frightened into 
wearing a false-face upon your soul; have you 
a fear of the Jews? Well, come at any rate by 
night and learn how to be born again, at least, 
to the extent of doffing the mask which day- 
time cowardice has fitted upon you. Nico- 
demus, finally, through childlike humility and 
through courage, arrived for the burial of his 
Master. 



COMPARISONS ARE— 



/ 



COMPARISONS ARE — 

IT was at a concert. His woman companions 
enjoyed the singing and were eager to say 
so, but he swamped their praises before 
they were fairly launched. His air was severely 
professional; his nonchalance was slightly ac- 
centuated; his judgments had a ring of hopeless 
finality. "The singing was good," he admitted, 
and felt himself aglow with his large generosity 
in bestowing the faint praise of the positive 
"good," yet, checked by the consciousness of 
superior experience, he hastened to add: "But 
I have heard better." You have all made the 
acquaintance of such a bird of ill-omen croak- 
ing hoarsely as you left the play, "I have seen 
better." Your favorite book or friend or place 
is accepted by him with an air of tolerance. 
"Yes, yes! But I have known better." 

If he were really a connoisseur, you would 
165 



166 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

not mind so much, but as he is a mere amateur 
or rather one who is just one week ahead of 
you in his information, or one night ahead of 
you in seeing the play, you submit with ill 
grace to the superiority which he has conferred 
upon himself, not by ability, but by agility. 
Your true critic will not strive to impress you 
by his conceit. He will have a high ideal, but 
he will make of it for others an incentive rather 
than a deterrent. He will not force the scalers 
to slide despairingly to the bottom because they 
have not reached his lofty heights. At his 
altitude the true connoisseur sees so many 
higher ridges rising before him, that he wel- 
comes with cheering encouragement those who 
are perched upon lower peaks than himself. 
He is not so prompt to triumph and cry: "I 
have seen better," when he is humbled by 
the vision of a bewildering succession of tower- 
ing eminences still unsealed. 

But to come back to the self-satisfied supe- 
riority of your concert friend. He has the nar- 
row conceit of a collector of bric-a-brac. He is 
delighted to be able to say that he has the only 
stamp of its kind. "Here is the only ring of 
this make in existence." "After blowing this 



COMPARISONS ARE — 167 

bottle, the glass-maker breathed his last." 
Take a man with such a narrow outlook and 
send him out to visit his neighbors. He will 
inevitably take the special smiles and special 
dishes and special attentions he receives, as 
continuous performances instead of a particu- 
lar benefit for himself, and then go home to 
brandish threateningly that bit of superior 
information above the heads of his own house- 
hold. It is bad enough to have the ghost of 
the "cake mother used to bake," haunting 
unhappy tables, without importing "better 
smiles," "better chairs," "better pictures," 
"better whatnots" like so many specters to 
haunt and terrify a poor housewife all the rest 
of her days. Of course, there are limitations 
and shortcomings everywhere, but they be- 
come very malodorous as well as odious, should 
the critic make comparisons. Yet if every rose 
has a thorn, why will the critic insist upon press- 
ing his nose upon the point of the thorn instead 
of smothering it in the fragrant softness of the 
fair petals? The friends of one of these "seen 
better" critics tied some ripe, golden pumpkins 
to an apple tree and asked the critic if he had 
seen better apples than those; "They would 



168 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

make good crab-apples in Ireland, where I have 
seen better," replied he, nothing daunted. 

It is such comparative critics who like a thing 
just when they haven't it, who will not see 
progress where they cannot see perfection, who 
refuse to recognize a man that has stepped 
from the gutter because he has not at once 
mounted to a tall pedestal, who admit no good 
unless it is the best and only, who divide the 
universe into two classes, their experiences and 
zeros. They would root up the blade because 
they do not find that the grain has sprouted 
up over night and has presented to them a 
self-cooked, predigested breakfast food all ready 
for their fastidious tastes. "First the blade, 
then the ear, then the full grain in the ear," 
but many a modest blade has been withered 
to barrenness by the supercilious condescension 
of those who have seen, known, felt or ex- 
perienced better blades. 



SAVING UP 



SAVING UP 



ANY years ago there was a mule at 



Avignon, a mule belonging to the 



Pope, a mule with a sensitive appre- 
ciation of its station and dignity. Alas! the 
mule was made the sport of a practical joker 
and was exposed to ridicule and indignity. 
Daudet has told the story, and in his works 
you may read it. What concerns us here is 
that upon that mule's imagination was branded 
a picture of its humiliation and in that mule's 
hind leg was evoked a responsive tingle. The 
picture never faded, but its outlines were 
burned in deeper, and its colors grew ever more 
glaring. The tingle, too, grew to a quiver, 
an ache, a pent-up volcano. The mule was 
saving up. Finally, one day the hind leg 
"erupted," and his tormentor entered into 
the realms of Herculaneum and Pompeii. It 
is a fairly conservative estimate that nine- 




171 



172 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

tenths of the photo plays and novels are made 
up of the hind leg of a mule variously disguised, 
of a saving up, of a last scene where she, he or 
it "gets hers, his or its." On the more numer- 
ous reels of life the same saving up proclivities 
and the same watching and waiting and the 
same avalanche and collision are enacted daily. 
Recall the vendettas, the conquered provinces, 
the toast to "The Day," the stock-market, the 
divorce court, the election which puts out the 
party in power and ushers in those who have 
been saving up. 

The tendency for saving up is widespread. 
You have philatelists, misers, bibliophiles, an- 
tiquarians, numismatists, gossips and other 
collectors. You will find the tendency to save 
up among savages. Some collect scalps; others 
collect heads. In the lowest class of barbarian 
collectors you will find those who save up 
grievances, waiting long and patiently to exact 
redress with compound interest. 

Take a hurried glance at the unrivaled col- 
lection of wrongs gathered through long years 
and ever gloated upon by some fond owners. 
Here, see, is one sneer carefully labeled. There, 
look, is a stab with the dagger still in the 



SAVING UP 173 

wound and the point is to be turned around 
regularly to keep the blood flowing. Further, 
under a glass case you may study at your 
leisure a dozen mummified insults offered to 
great grandfathers or some offensive remarks 
mounted on pins. Finally, there, marked 
"Handle with care," is a delicate treasure; it 
is the report of the surmise of a conjecture of a 
statement of hers, derogatory to brother's 
wife's fourth cousin's mother. Such is the 
unrivaled museum of the "saver up." This 
way to the egress! 

Saving up belongs to the period of the toma- 
hawk, the war-path and the scalping party. 
Civilization, law, order, justice, hand their 
cases to the police, the attorney and the jury. 
The spirit of saving up, the spirit of revenge is 
personal. Revenge wants to have the satis- 
faction of paying its own debts. It buys a 
knife and a grindstone and practices shooting 
at targets. It undoes civilization, destroys 
Christianity, reverts to savage barbarism and 
the barbarous methods of reprisals. 

The way to stop this storing up of grievances 
is to stop its cause. The man who hands over 
to the court the righting of his wrongs, has at 



174 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

once cured himself of the habit of saving up 
grievances and gloating over them. He per- 
mits justice to right his wrongs and feels no 
need of forever whetting the edge of his re- 
setitment against his saved up affronts. He 
goes quietly about his work, throws out of his 
soul the subterranean chamber of horrors, and 
lets in the sunlight. 

But what if human justice cannot assume the 
burden of restoring the balance; what if it 
cannot exorcise from your soul the diabolical 
delight of taking personal revenge? Why, 
"Revenge is mine and I will repay." Rise to 
a higher, nobler economy. Save more, save 
longer, hand over your grievances at once to a 
divine treasury, where they will be saved up 
till Infinite Justice will give final and complete 
satisfaction at the last court of the world. 



A VORACIOUS MONSTER 



A VORACIOUS MONSTER 
EWSPAPER head-lines and the price- 



tags in bargain sales, being largely 



prompted by the pressing need of the 
immediate disposal of surplus goods, are not 
generally considered to be oversensitive in 
using words in their exact meaning. In the 
lexicon of advertising you do not find the word, 
"falsehood." You find "quick returns, effi- 
ciency, thoroughness, unblemished superla- 
tiveness," and the like. Advertising is the 
fabulous dragon of the day demanding its con- 
tinual tribute of victims. Such trifles as 
grammar and truth have long since gone down 
its capacious maw, and its rapacity is whetted 
for daintier food. 

Many of our distinguished modern writers 
can now be hired at so much a word to write 
up anything from a baby's sock to an old man's 
shroud. You pick up an attractively bound book, 
entitled 4 4 The Passing of Time," and written 




177 



178 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

by the well-known editor of the Pharisee. 
Having been acquainted with the author's 
previous works, you settle back for an enjoy- 
able hour. You do not at first detect the 
deception, but before the end you find you 
have been decoyed into reading an advertise- 
ment for a Dollar Watch. Your favorite 
artist, too, the creator of the Fishson Young 
Man, has now a permanent occupation sketch- 
ing all kinds and conditions of people in All- 
theimer's Clothes. No office or position or 
eminence is secure from the power of advertis- 
ing. If you are an actor you are using Some- 
body's toilet articles; if an actress, you are 
wearing Somebody's hats; if you are a baseball 
player, you are getting a constant supply of 
tobacco because you always use the Worst 
Weed Brand. College professors draw a hand- 
some salary and give lucrative positions to the 
rest of their families, all engaged in the pub- 
licity department of great railroads. 

If literature, art, professorial honor, truth, 
honesty, decency have been swept away by ad- 
vertising, who will be the next victim? The 
man seated beside you at table may seem to 
you perfectly innocent when he praises the 



A VORACIOUS MONSTER 179 

hostess' relish, but be careful or you will find 
that he has a catalog of the other fifty-eight 
varieties in his inside pocket. Why should 
friendship and hospitality be more sacred than 
conscience and self-respect? 

Had advertising been in existence in Homer's 
time, he never would have begged his bread in 
seven cities. The Smyrna Fig Co. would have 
acquired exclusive control of his verse to 6 'limn 
in mellifluous lines the succulent fig-tree of 
Smyrna." 

We should have had later on such startling 
announcements as these: "This statue for the 
Tiber River Food Co., displaying muscular 
development due to its cereals, comes from the 
studio of Michelangelo Buonarroti." "This 
canvas, picturing the 1516 model of an ox- 
cart, was done by the special artist of the 
Florence Car Co., Antonio Allegri di Cor- 
reggio." "The Leeds Incubator Mfr. has the 
pleasure of announcing that the famous his- 
torian, essayist and writer of "The Lays of 
Ancient Rome," T. Babington Macaulay, has 
consented to write entirely for this company's 
products. Mr. Macaulay will contribute a 
lay for every incubator." 



180 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

The unregenerate individual, Advertising, 
must have the gospel preached to him. He 
must be converted. Advertising religion is a 
recent rallying cry. It is well. Make adver- 
tising the ally, not the master of religion. Let 
the lion lie down beside the lamb. If writers, 
artists, professors, preachers cry out that they 
must yield to the imperious demands of ad- 
vertising, because they say, "We must live," 
religion should assert with a divine imperious- 
ness that such extraordinary demands are not 
to be acceded to, because religion will reply: 
"That it is appointed for all men to die; that 
the necessities of life are not superior to the 
necessity of God's law; that if Christ advised 
friendship with the mammon of iniquity, we, 
too, ought and can make 'advertising our 
servants, not our tyrants.' " 



WHAT ARE CURMUDGEONS? 



WHAT ARE CURMUDGEONS? 



SCIENTISTS have some difficulty about 
the proper classification of the curmudg- 
eon. Those who say it is a marsupial 
and to be classed with the wombats, the kan- 
garoos and the bandicoots, point triumphantly 
to the purse which every curmudgeon carries 
close to the heart, and mention the fact that 
marsupials belong to the lowest existing mam- 
mals, down into which they have no hesitation 
in dropping the curmudgeon. On the other 
hand scientists equally competent put the cur- 
mudgeon with the turtles, and assert that they 
have close kinship with the snapping variety. 
To establish their views those zoologists bring 
forward the curmudgeons' well-known pro- 
clivities for pouncing swiftly on their prey and 
then instantly closing up tight beneath a hard, 
impenetrable shell. Like the turtle, too, the 
curmudgeons, as observers have not failed to 



184 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

note, hide their eggs in banks, but strangely 
enough no one has seen any eggs of the cur- 
mudgeon hatch out. Curmudgeon's eggs are 
like cold-storage eggs, no doubt; intended to 
increase one's capital, not one's chickens. 

Because of this uncertainty in scientific 
circles, a further study of the curmudgeon's 
habits and habitat seems desirable at this 
time. The creature has long been known to 
the world. The most noticeable peculiarity 
of the curmudgeon is the propensity to hoard. 
Other animals store away for a rainy day. 
With the curmudgeon every day is a rainy day, 
and there is never a stop to hoarding. The 
hoard is never lessened by consumption. The 
only pleasure the curmudgeon seems to take 
in what is stored up is to look at it and feel it. 
A special delight is shown for green paper with 
odds and ends of silk thread in it. The rustle 
of these rectangular papers and perhaps too 
the pictures on them give intense delight to the 
curmudgeons. They also love the sight and 
clink of gold and silver coin. Some of these 
habits would denote that curmudgeons are an 
evolution of the bird family, some of whom like 
to line their nests well with showy comforts. 



WHAT ARE CURMUDGEONS? 185 

Other habits, however, denote some kinship 
with the boa-constrictor, whose voracious ap- 
petite survives in the curmudgeons. 

The curmudgeons avoid bright, joyous 
places, but love banks where they are often 
seen retiring into dark, mysterious recesses, 
hiding away their hoards. It is easier to get 
a bone from the jaws of a bulldog than to in- 
duce curmudgeons to let go of anything they 
have picked up. They make a bone look like 
a billiard-ball, so clean do they scrape it. They 
are said to draw blood from a stone. At all 
events, it is a well-authenticated fact that they 
are skinflints, and any stones near the cur- 
mudgeons have no necessity to roll in order to 
lose their green moss. The curmudgeons will 
see to that. Outstretched hands elicit deep 
growls from them, and orphans and widows 
are a special abomination, driving the cur- 
mudgeons into frenzied apprehension for their 
hoards, which occasionally in the long history 
of their race have been known to melt before 
the tears of the poor and outcast. 

Young curmudgeons offer interesting fields 
for study. They are usually male and very 
hard to tame. It was a young curmudgeon's 



186 



CHAFF AND WHEAT 



mother who begged her offspring, ' ' Be polite, 
now Johnny, and give your sister the larger 
piece of cake." "Ah, let her be polite," growled 
the young curmudgeon. Another when re- 
quested to give his sister the lion's share of the 
bananas, made a curmudgeonly answer, "Lions 
don't eat bananas," and his sister got the lion's 
share. 

Are there any church curmudgeons? Every- 
body knows there are church mice, and they 
are a poor set. The church curmudgeons are 
almost extinct. They have to practice what 
is called in the animal kingdom, protective 
mimicry, putting on a mask which causes them 
to merge into their surroundings and elude 
detection. They must pretend to be poor. 
It was the first church curmudgeon who 
growled out, "This might have been sold and 
given to the poor." He was a marsupial, a 
bearer of the purse. 



I HAVE BEEN DEAD 



I HAVE BEEN DEAD 



IT isn't fair, I say, Mother, and I don't know 
how long I can put up with it." There 
was bitterness in his tone, and discontent 
showed itself in the way he threw to one side 
his workman's hat and dragged a stool into 
place and swept the poor cottage with a glance 
that hardened more and more till it met the 
wistful gaze of his Mother. "Well, Mother," 
he resumed lamely, "this growling, I know, 
makes you feel bad, but to-day I felt as I never 
felt before that I wasn't getting a chance. 
Here are most of the boys who played with me 
a few years ago, now making names for them- 
selves. There's Daniel who has become a law- 
yer, and John is a priest, and Michael is a doc- 
tor. Then others are succeeding in trade and 
business. If I only had the chance, I could 
do something for you, Mother. . . . Now, 
don't stop me. I know what you are going to 
say. Of course, 'you are satisfied,' but you 

are too easily satisfied. I want to give you the 
189 



190 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

best there is, and I can't do it, stuck in that 
old shop. You will say that father once did 
well and was happy and that you don't want 
anything more. But what if I got sick, what if 
I died? — Forgive me, Mother, I'm not myself 
to-night and haven't been right for some time. 
'God will provide,' you tell me. Right, 
Mother, I'm getting worse than the heathens. 
• • • • 

"Do you remember my bitterness last week? 
Don't look at me that way, Mother, I am not 
going away again in a hurry. I wouldn't have 
been brought back to you unless it was meant 
I should stay awhile. I say, do you remember 
the way I growled? That was the beginning 
of the fatal fever, I'm sure, but whether it 
was or not, I've got that salt off my tongue. 
It is just this way. Suppose a war came down 
upon us. We seem now to be a city where one 
section would not look at the other, and in the 
same section where one street would not speak 
to another, and on the same street where 
neighbors are always quarreling and in the 
same house where brothers and sisters are 
snapping at each other. Ah, but then comes 
the common enemy and differences disappear. 



I HAVE BEEN DEAD 191 

The city becomes one loving family. The 
great evil of death throws its shadow over them 
all, and they flock together and cling to one 
another. What are all their petty trials before 
the agony of war? There are, you well know, 
giants and pygmies among the blades of grass 
and, if I were a cricket, I would know it, but 
now standing high above the field, I would 
laugh if I heard the grass-blades were fighting 
about their size. So it was with me, Mother, 
I was getting small and cranky. The dust of 
life tormented me as if I were all eyes, but now 
all the dust falls on calloused horny hands. The 
great, the terrible enemy met me. I forgot all 
my troubles. The world became my family; 
man became my brother, when I came to die. 
. . . Don't start, Mother, I am sure it 
won't happen for a long time again. You see 
me now, glad my comrades have succeeded in 
life. I do not note where I am different from 
them, but now I see where I can be a success 
in my own way or where I can at least try to 
be a success. There is pain about me and I 
can be a doctor to it; there are snarls and I 
can disentangle them a bit, though I don't 
know much law, and there is sin everywhere 



192 



CHAFF AND WHEAT 



which I can, though no priest, help to stop. 

"I was lost and am found again. I was dead 
and am come to life. Heaven has come nearer 
to us all. I have been sent back from it by- 
One Who has come down from heaven. Now 
what a change! A new spirit has come into 
the world. The neighbor has been discovered, 
and he lives across the seas as well as here, and 
men are going to seek him and serve him. 
Luke, the doctor, is going and Matthew, the 
banker, and Andrew and Peter, the fishermen 
and many others. They are forgetting their 
own little troubles, and giving themselves to 
man. My grumbling has gone forever. All 
other evil is nothing now; all other good is little 
when set beside heaven and His kingdom. I 
am going back to the shop to-morrow. Why, 
Mother, He was a carpenter Himself. 

"He went into a city named Nairn, and when 
He came nigh to the gate of the city, behold, a 
dead man was carried out, the only son of his 
mother. The Lord saw her and said to her, ' Weep 
not'. And He said, 'Young man, I say to thee, 
arise,' and he that was dead sat up and began to 
speak. And He delivered him to his mother." 



THE CARVING OUT OF A 
CHARACTER 



THE CARVING OUT OF A 
CHARACTER 

N'O one can fairly object to the statement 
that character is the outcome of choice. 
~~ Character is the substance and shape 
of our present constitution of soul. It is the 
complexion of our will. It is that strange 
mixture of good and bad habits, the resultant 
of past conduct, and the shaper of future 
conduct. Choice, character, conduct are three 
links in a chain. Choice determines the act; 
acts form the habit; habits make up the char- 
acter; character shapes the conduct. Add up, 
therefore, all the choices of the past, and you 
have the character of the present, and you can 
in part, at least, foreshadow the conduct of 
the future. 

What is choice? Choice is an act of the will. 

It is the answer of liberty to the conflicting 
195 



196 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

claims of inclination; it is the decision handed 
down from the bench in the case between 
plaintiff desire and defendant duty; it is the 
handwriting on the law, the approving signa- 
ture or the veto, when the bill has been argued 
and amended by the contending parties of 
reason and feeling in the senate chamber of 
the soul. 

Choice sometimes goes with inclination and 
sometimes against it. By inclination is meant 
the feelings, the emotions, the likes and dis- 
likes, the whims and fancies, the prejudices and 
partialities, the hopes and the fears that are 
forever drifting in and out of the soul, some- 
times gathering into dark storms, sometimes 
falling in the rain of tears, sometimes dissi- 
pated into clear, bright weather. Choice must 
always be entering into and interfering with 
this changing world of inclination. Inclina- 
tion, too, may be considered as the expression 
of natural disposition, the combined volume 
of the various cries for satisfaction, the total 
hunger of man. Choice must regulate the food 
that goes to the appetites. It must decide 
whether there shall be fasting or feasting or 
temperance diet. Choice, therefore, must be 



THE CARVING OUT OF A CHARACTER 197 

strong to keep self-possessed in the storms of 
contending inclinations; it must be resolute 
against the united clamor of all the appetites. 

How is this strength to be obtained? The 
words of Christ come at once to the mind. 
They are universal and decisive. "If any man 
will come after me, let him deny himself." It 
is certain, too, that what has been called in- 
clination may be the help of God Himself. The 
fears, the hopes, the depressions and elations 
of the soul, many of our restless feelings and 
emotions are often caught in their very birth, 
and lifted by the free gift and power of God 
into graces which profoundly influence choice 
in its preference of God. In daily life the 
teaching, the example, the grace of Christ are 
always present in the carving out of , a char- 
acter, and if there is opposition, the soul exults 
in it, and by the power of God finds in the very 
poignancy of sacrifice a sweetness unknown to 
carnal man. It was in such transport of soul 
that St. Teresa cried out that she must suffer 
or would die. In this discussion, however, 
these truths are supposed, and are not denied 
or belittled because they are not spoken of 
more. 



198 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

Character may be taken in a good or bad 
sense as the habits of good or evil predominate 
in the soul. Here it is taken in a good sense. 
When we speak of the carving of character, we 
mean the fashioning of a good character. 
Carving supposes an effort against opposition. 
There must be a material; it must resist; the 
resistance must be overcome, else there is no 
carving. Good character, then, it seems to be 
implied, is worked out against the stubborn- 
ness of material, and is won at the sacrifice 
and discarding of much unshapely refuse. Is 
this true? Must good character be carved out? 
Must opposition accompany its growth and 
sacrifice be the condition of its development? 
Must the studio resound to the blow of chisel 
and hammer and be littered with scattered 
fragments before character takes the shape 
and beauty of goodness? These are so many 
statements of one question: Is good character 
formed by the work of choice acting against 
inclination? 

Character, it has been said, is the result of 
choice. Good character will be the result of 
good choice. Strengthen choice and you 
strengthen character. Now it is clear from 



THE CARVING OUT OF A CHARACTER 199 

many instances that a power grows strong by- 
use and vreak by disuse. If you always ride, 
your powers of walking grow weaker. If you 
keep your arm forever in a sling, its muscles 
will become as helpless as those which ought 
to wag your ears. Choice does not escape the 
law of use and disuse. It will become strong 
by using, that is, by choosing. Inclination 
sometimes goes the way of duty, and then 
choice must travel the same way. In that case 
choice does not do very much choosing. It 
does some. It agrees to go, but the force in 
most part comes from the current which bears 
it along. It might be said that choice instead 
of growing strong when bound in the same 
direction with inclination, rather grows weak. 
The muscles that might be strengthened by 
rowing are relaxed in drifting, and it calls for 
more soul energy to lay hold on the oars again. 
But when inclination is downstream away from 
duty, and choice is upstream, then choice is 
taking vigorous exercise. To every signal of 
duty the resolute oarsman must make ready 
response. The bow must swing to the right or 
to the left to meet the varying impulse of swift 
currents that would swerve him from his 



200 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

course. The pulling is hard; the hand on the 
oar grows tired, but every moment of that 
weariness is precious. It means greater 
strength, greater powers of endurance for the 
future. It means continual choosing in the 
face of more strongly opposing inclination. It 
means finally choice, the master and inclina- 
tion, the servant. It means that the artist of 
character is carving out a finished work of art. 

There is a story told of the famous sculptor, 
Canova, and it is much to our purpose. When 
Canova was a lad, he was the friend of a certain 
nobleman's cook, and on the occasion of a 
great dinner, to gratify this friend, he carved 
a lion out of butter. The lion found a promi- 
nent place on the table, attracted the attention 
of the guests, and won for the youthful sculptor 
the patronage of the nobleman. With his help 
Canova was able to give himself wholly to the 
art which he liked and for which he showed so 
much aptitude. He became one of the greatest 
of modern sculptors, and at the height of his 
fame was deputed to carve a monument to the 
memory of Pope Clement XIII. This is one of 
his best works, say the critics, and the best part 
of it in their opinion is the two lions at the base. 



THE CARVING OUT OF A CHARACTER 201 

Here is a good illustration of the necessity of 
opposition in the carving of character. Where 
inclination offers no opposition to choice, there 
is the lion in butter. The finger muscles of a 
child can cut their way through such yielding 
material. They fashion for us a pretty figure. 
How delicate are the lines! How graceful the 
sweep of the golden mane! "Beautiful!" cry 
the guests around the nobleman's table. " Show 
us the artist." It is a boy. He is full of prom- 
ise; he shows unmistakable signs of genius, but 
he is only a boy yet. His fingers have the 
strength to carve butter. He needs the right 
arm of a man to be sculptor in marble. His 
title to greatness was not to rest on a feat of 
skill that he performed in a kitchen. Out of 
his studio came lions in marble, and on them 
he rested his fame. The carver of character 
will be doing a boy's work; he will be turning 
out lions in butter if he never feels the opposi- 
tion of inclination. He must cut his way 
through repugnance, prejudice, humiliation* 
discouragement and a host of other hostile in- 
clinations. They form the rough grain, the 
tough texture out of which he is to carve his 
lasting, more glorious lions of marble. He will 



202 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

not fear the melting powers of the sunbeam with 
a character like that. He can come out of cold 
storage and face the world without fear of im- 
mediate dissolution. His character may not 
look as beautiful and as golden as the one in 
which inclination yielded readily to choice, but 
it will wear better. It took arm muscles and 
not finger muscles to make his character, and 
it will take an equal or greater power to destroy 
his character. It can weather the storm with- 
out an umbrella; it can stand the heat without 
the artificial help of a refrigerator. It is a lion 
in marble and puts its sculptor on the roll of 
fame. The artist has carved out a character. 



BECAUSE! 



BECAUSE! 

IT is a venerable witticism, antedating the 
latest discovery of the earliest remains of 
man, that a woman's reason is "because." 
This revered and ancient remark has furnished 
countless occasions for cheap merriment on the 
part of shallow males since Mr. Pithecanthropus 
Erectus laid himself away for our scientific dis- 
cussions. The laugher fails to note that his 
own philosophy is shallower than that which 
excites his laughter. When a woman says 
"because" in answer to your question "why," 
is it absence of all reason as Mr. Pith, etc., 
thought, or may it not be the presence of vari- 
ous reasons, that has driven her to that last 
trench, "because," before the persistent at- 
tacks of your "why"? 

"Because" may be a check to insistent 
curiosity; it may be the delicate shrinking of 
a timid reserve; it may be a jealous guarding 

£05 



206 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

of sacred personalities; most of all, it may be 
the hopeless acknowledgment of a vast and 
complicated assemblage of motives which 
baffle analysis and defy expression. If one 
may be speechless from having nothing to say, 
one may be speechless from awe, from bewilder- 
ment, from having too much to say. The most 
generous and chivalrous conclusion to draw 
from the brevity of a woman's "because" is 
not poverty or paucity of ideas but abundant 
richness of sympathy and instinct. While 
many a profoundly philosophic man is tracing 
his laborious way through a jungle of reason- 
ing, a woman has winged her victorious flight 
to a successful conclusion, which is adequately 
voiced in the triumphant but mysterious 
"because." 

Indeed your "because" is fraught with 
momentous consequences for time and for 
eternity. "Because" may be the herald of 
your principles of conduct or your motive of 
action. That word, like the magic formula in 
the fairy story, may throw open to view the 
hidden depths of character. Herod we know, 
"because of them that were at table he would 
not displease the daughter of Herodias." John, 



BECAUSE ! 



207 



whom Herod beheaded, we know, "because he 
must increase and I must decrease." Magdalen 
took her place among the saints "because she 
loved much." Joseph rose to loftier heights of 
sanctity " because he was a just man," and ruled 
himself accordingly. The principle, the motive, 
you choose to act upon, is more yours than 
your flesh and blood, your distinctive carriage, 
your looks or even your finger prints. These 
last may all be inherited or at all events you 
had little to do with the making of them. But 
that "because" which you finally and delib- 
erately elect to act upon, is the product of your 
liberty, your free self, not simply flesh of your 
flesh, but soul of your soul, an output of your 
character and index to its nature. You know 
now why that good man made the answer he 
did when he was taxed with performing a cer- 
tain onerous work solely for the reason that 
he knew a good drink would solace him in his 
labors. Pausing to differentiate his motives 
conscientiously, he denied the charge. "No, I 
did not do my hard work because of the drink," he 
stoutly maintained, "but all the same let me 
just impress it upon you that I wouldn't do it 
without the drink, either," he frankly added. 



208 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

You may not be able to discriminate with 
such nicety as that, or through self-deception 
you may be keeping uppermost a display of 
respectable motives to prevent a guilty con- 
science from ascertaining whether the fruit 
below is as ripe and rosy as that on top. You 
feel, what is most true, that it is better to have 
right principles and wrong actions, than wrong 
principles with right actions. A wrong act 
passes; a wrong principle persists. Men in 
all ages have been guilty of base actions, but 
it was wrong principles which have been re- 
sponsible for Mahometanism and Mormonism. 
A robber may blow up a building; an Anarchist 
would blow up civilization and not be ashamed. 
Why did Christ love sinners and hate the 
world? Sinners had been guilty of wrong acts; 
they had not, like the world, surrendered 
themselves to false principles. On the day of 
General Judgment "because" will be the final 
arbiter of all mankind. "Amen I say to you, 
because you did it to one of these my least 
brethren, you did it unto me." 



HOW TO TELL A JESUIT 



HOW TO TELL A JESUIT 



ONE WAY 



VERYBODY would like to be able to 



know a Jesuit when he met one. Is 



there any sign by which a Jesuit is dis- 
criminated from his fellow-mortals? Is the 
disguise of a Jesuit always impenetrable? 
These are questions that press for an answer in 
this curious, inquiring age. Luckily we have 
not far to go for information. The Century 
Magazine a few years ago had a story entitled 
"The Case of Patricia." The story was good; 
the lesson conveyed was excellent, but of those 
points we do not care to speak. We note the 
following sentence that suggests one way of 
telling a Jesuit: "Time had been when a 
lawyer was really your man of business and 
waited deferentially upon you in your own 
home — at least she had read of such in Dickens, 
or was it Scott? — a sleek, black-garbed, learned 
man that glided as mysteriously as a Jesuit in 




211 



212 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

and out of stately English houses." It is 
refreshing to meet old friends where least 
expected. We are glad to see the Jesuit glid- 
ing once more, and still mysteriously, in the 
realms of fiction. The mysterious Jesuit glide 
is an old favorite, and perhaps by a subtle 
association of ideas it came back to the author's 
mind when she mentioned Scott and Dickens. 
Fiction is fond of the stereotyped, but we had 
begun to fancy that with the intense originality 
and very advanced modernity of the con- 
temporaneous novel the Jesuit would lose his 
glide and be stripped of his mysteriousness. 
It is not to be, and we have Elizabeth Herrick 
to thank for bringing out on the stage an old- 
time star. 

But what of the glide mysterious as a dis- 
criminating mark? Can we tell a Jesuit by 
his walk? We fear not. The glide will not 
do. It is not a reality; it is fictitious; it is 
conventional. To-day we must have facts, and 
we must have science. With gratitude we 
turn from the imaginative to the rational. 
The scientific test of a Jesuit has been dis- 
covered by a German physiognomist, Herr 
Grube by name. Professor Grube has written 



HOW TO TELL A JESUIT 



213 



a book which he calls "Biographical Minia- 
tures. " In that work he gives us the trade- 
mark of the Jesuit with scientific exactness 
and philosophical certainty. Indeed he says, 
"There is perhaps among all religious physiog- 
nomies none more easily recognizable than the 
Jesuit type." These words are reassuring and 
remove all traces of doubt from the most skep- 
tical. Why appeal to a glide, however mysteri- 
ous, when you have the satisfying exposition 
of a full-fledged physiognomist? "Jesuit eyes," 
continues Professor Grube, "have been pro- 
verbial. Indeed I am convinced that I can 
detect a Jesuit not by his eyes only, but also 
by the shape of his head. Let the Jesuit dress 
as he will, he bears about with him the mark* 
of his order patent to everybody in his look, 
patent to the professional physiognomist in the 
outline of his head. There are three special 
features to be remarked in this outline, namely, 
the forehead, the nose, and the chin. The 
forehead is nearly always high-arched and 
massive; seldom narrow and thick set; the nose 
always large and aquiline; the chin large, 
though not fat, and protruding. The eyes are 
always somewhat closed, the mouth firm. It 



214 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

is worthy of note among the Jesuits, who are 
so distinguished for learning, there are few, if 
any, true specimens of the real philosophical 
head." 

Here then the secret is fully revealed. We 
have at last a truly scientific diagnosis of the 
Jesuit physiognomy. The Jesuit of fiction 
will now be replaced, we hope, by the Jesuit 
of science. If you suspect a man of being a 
Jesuit, and he insists on taking the trolley in- 
stead of gliding mysteriously, you cannot thus 
be easily foiled. Put him face to face with the 
portraiture of Professor Grube, and he is dis- 
covered. He may slink or shuffle instead of 
gliding; he may close his eyes entirely and so 
elude the vigilance of the undiscerning, but he 
cannot compress his forehead, he cannot shrink 
his nose, he cannot pull in his chin, and the 
professional physiognomist, with these prom- 
inent protuberances to guide him, can pick a 
Jesuit out of a five o'clock trolley. The Jesuit 
in disguise is no longer even fictitious; he is a 
myth. Professor Grube with a " real, philosoph- 
ical head" has discovered and classified a new 
variety, or perhaps we may say species, of the 
genus homo, and the world breathes more easily. 



\ 



HOW TO TELL A JESUIT 



HOW TO TELL A JESUIT 

ANOTHER WAY 

THE best way of all to tell a man is to 
know his deeds. The physiognomist, 
however scientific, is no fair substitute 
for the historian. To unbiased historians 
then we may refer for an adequate description 
of the standard Jesuit. The study of four cen- 
turies will no doubt take some time, and in the 
meanwhile, as you wait, we may here consider 
a simpler test for distinguishing a Jesuit, a test 
not determined from gait or carriage but from 
thought, not from the mien but from the mind. 
What is the mind of the Jesuit? The contro- 
versial novelist, the parrot historian and others, 
relying on a well-known definition coined by 
enemies and on centuries of prejudiced tradi- 
tion, will perhaps tell you that the Jesuit mind 
is "fit for stratagem and spoils'' and charac- 
terized by "ways that are dark." But how 
217 



218 CHAFF AND WHEAT 



will the true historian arrive at a correct insight 
into the Jesuit mind? Is not the question im- 
possible to answer? "Many Jesuits, many 
minds," a man might say, and he would be 
right. But there is a sense in which we may 
take the words and get perhaps a satisfactory 
answer to our question. The product of the 
mind is an index to its contents. A man would 
wish to be judged by his deliberate and repre- 
sentative thoughts. A country adopts as its 
own the official acts of its accredited ambassa- 
dor. So the Jesuit mind might well be content 
to be indexed by its works, and surely will prefer 
such an indexing to being forever classified 
under a discreditable and unfounded formula. 

Now all this is but an introduction to the 
tenth volume of Sommervogel's "Bibliotheque 
de la Compagnie de Jesus." Carlos Sommer- 
vogel, S.J., Strasbourgeois, as he liked to call 
himself, brought out a new edition of the 
dictionary of Jesuit writers which had been 
written by the Fathers De Backer, S.J., and 
by Auguste Carayon, S.J. Father Sommer- 
vogel enlarged the work to nine volumes and 
had just begun to classify its contents when he 
died. Pierre Bliard, S.J., his successor, has 



HOW TO TELL A JESUIT 219 

made an index of the nine volumes and gives a 
classified list of all the works published by 
Jesuit writers from the foundation of the order 
until quite recent times. ("Bibliotheque de la 
Compagnie de Jesus." Tome X. Tablet de 
la Premiere Partie. Par Pierre Bliard. Paris. 
Librairie Alphonse Picard et Fils. 1909.) 

That index should give a picture of the Jesuit 
mind, a picture quite different from the tradi- 
tional one and yet a picture which historians 
may accept as authentic. The published works 
of the entire Jesuit Order may well serve to 
show what the mind of its members is. The 
index proper consists of more than 1900 col- 
umns. Of these, 100 columns are given to 
works on Scripture, 200 to Dogmatic and 
Moral Theology, 200 to Ascetical Theology, 
and 200 to Controversy. If to these are added 
the 100 columns of Ecclesiastical History, the 
50 columns on Missions, and the 100 on the 
Lives of the Saints, it will be found that 950 
columns or about one-half of the whole index 
is taken up with theology in its wide sense. 
The remaining columns are divided among 
Literature, 450 columns; Science, 200 columns, 
and History, 200 columns. The figures, of 



220 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

course, are given approximately and in round 
numbers. The Jesuit mind, then, if we are to 
judge by its official and representative products 
for several centuries, is one-half theological, 
somewhat less than one-quarter literary, and 
about one-ninth scientific and in the same ratio 
historical. The residue is varied. 

An inspection of the subdivisions under the 
larger classifications reveals some strange facts. 
Perhaps the most remarkable is the collection 
of works on poetry, made up of compositions 
as well as treatises on the art. One hundred 
columns are taken up with poetry. Twenty 
columns are given to dramas written by 
Jesuits. Under the heading, German, which 
includes Austria, three hundred and fifty 
authors of plays are mentioned, exclusive of 
the larger number of plays grouped under the 
names of colleges. These names fill eight col- 
umns. The other twelve, devoted to the 
cataloguing of dramas, contain chiefly the 
playwrights of Belgium, France, Italy and 
Poland. Readers familiar with Jesuit education 
will know the large part dramatic representa- 
tions occupied in its system. Most of the plays 
enumerated are Latin. Other interesting sec- 



HOW TO TELL A JESUIT 221 

tions are those on Astronomy, with thirty-five 
columns, and on Medicine and on Music, with 
four columns each. In a word, Fathers 
Sommervogel and Bliard afford the means of 
drawing up a very detailed phrenological chart 
of the Jesuit mind. 



PATRIOTISM OF PEACE 



PATRIOTISM OF PEACE 

WHAT is good citizenship? Good 
citizenship is the doing of our duty 
by our country. It is patriotism 
in the full sense of the word. That virtue is 
not the exclusive possession of the army and 
navy. It is not a plant that flowers only on 
battlefields and is fertilized only by human 
blood. Patriotism should flourish as well in 
peace as in war. For what is patriotism if not 
the practical love of one's country; a love not 
to be kept stored away until the day of danger, 
but to be kept in life and activity every day? 

When we speak of good citizenship, we seem 
to refer more to the statesman, the public 
official, the citizen; when we speak of patriot- 
ism, we seem to fix our gaze on the soldier and 
sailor and their officers, but that distinction is 
in the words only and not in the realities that 
correspond to the words. The man of war is 
a citizen; the man of peace is a citizen. They 

are both children of their country and doing 
225 



226 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

their duty by it in different ways. They both 
should be patriotic. 

It is Catholic teaching that groups together 
heaven, home and country. The loving duty 
we owe to all three could be expressed by one 
word in Latin. In English there is no common 
word. We call the virtue that makes us do our 
duty to God, religion; by our home, filial de- 
votion, by our country, patriotism. These 
virtues, however, are rightly connected. Pa- 
triotism cannot ignore the home and its duties, 
because the home is the unit of the State. 
Neither home nor State can ignore God, whose 
laws are the foundation and the bulwark of 
each, whose worship is the supreme duty of 
all. Constantius, the father of Constantine, 
called before him the Christians he had in his 
service. They were threatened with death 
unless they denied their faith. Some, with an 
eye on their position and their lives, aposta- 
tized. Others professed their willingness to die 
rather than to give up their religion. Con- 
stantius dismissed the former from his service 
and kept the latter. He considered, as Eusebius 
tells us, that those who were faithful to God 
would be faithful to him. 



PATRIOTISM OF PEACE 227 

There is more patriotism in the observance of 
the Ten Commandments than in all the cheer- 
ing and fireworks and singing of national hymns 
and flying of national flags the whole world 
over. All that is but the bubble-foam of the 
stream of patriotism. The law, the reverence 
for the law, the practical recognition of its dic- 
tates is the strong undercurrent. No ship of 
State can sail long on any other waters. The 
patriot of the Ten Commandments has had 
very few monuments built to his memory. He 
needs no monument. His country, in its con- 
tinued and prosperous existence, is his sufficient 
and undying memorial. 

Good citizenship is, in fact, the keeping of 
the Ten Commandments. Go down the list 
carved upon the tablets of Mt. Sinai and it 
will readily be seen how wide in its application 
is this short statement of good citizenship. 
Pick out, for example, the four words, "Thou 
shalt not steal"; put them over the doorways 
of our public buildings; present to every public 
officer a copy of them printed in large, legible 
letters; best of all, brand them on the con- 
science of every citizen, whether in office or 
out of it, recalling to that conscience that he 



228 



CHAFF AND WHEAT 



who takes from the people is stealing, that he 
who works for the people must earn his wages, 
that he who buys or sells for the people has no 
right to more than a just compensation, recall- 
ing that the law of God stands guard over the 
public treasury as well as over the private 
purse; do this and how vast will be the im- 
provement in every department of the public 
service. In four words of the law of God there 
is a mighty volume of good citizenship. What 
will be the extent of that patriotism when the 
Ten Commandments reach out in all their com- 
prehension and in all their details over town 
and State and Nation? If one Commandment 
banishes so many hideous evils, what will be 
the power of the whole ten? Put on every 
citizen of every country the ten-fold armor of 
God's law, and then you may muster out all 
your soldiers and sailors, make machinery of 
your guns and build hospitals for the sick and 
homes for the aged with the money now burnt 
in powder or thrown away in shot and shell. 

The practice of good citizenship is all there 
in the law of God. The honest voter, the 
conscientious office-holder, the incorruptible 
legislator, the unprejudiced juror, the upright 



PATRIOTISM OF PEACE 



229 



judge, are the product of the Ten Command- 
ments, whereas all the ignoble spawn of bad 
citizenship is the progeny of broken Command- 
ments, of unfulfilled obligations. 

Not only, however, is the practice of good 
citizenship to be found in the observance of 
God's law; in the Ten Commandments is also 
to be found the theory of good citizenship. 
There are evils in the world and for these evils 
there have been prescribed and made up hun- 
dreds of remedies. Hundreds of eloquent 
advertisers are hawking these remedies every- 
where. We have Nihilism and Anarchism and 
Individualism and Paternalism and Com- 
munism and Socialism and a host of other 
nostrums especially devised to cure all the 
diseases of country and citizen. What "ism" 
will the good citizen oppose to all these various 
devices? The very same thing that made him 
a good citizen in practice will make him one in 
theory. The only "ism" for the good citizen 
is "Ten Commandmentism." Be without this, 
and all the others accomplish nothing; have 
this, and they are all useless. 

Bring the Fourth Commandment in its full 
sense into the world of work, and employer and 



230 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

employee will recognize each other's rights 
and respect each other's duties. Bring the 
Seventh and Eighth into the world of business 
and politics, and trade and statesmanship will 
be carried on fairly and honestly and truth- 
fully. Bring the Fifth and Sixth into the 
home, and the family will prosper and will re- 
main unbroken. Give us, in other words, the 
capitalist who will not take unjust advantage 
of the laborer, and the laborer who faithfully 
performs the work he has contracted for with 
the capitalist; give us statesmen that never lie 
or deceive; give us competition without dis- 
honesty and good products without adultera- 
tion and business combinations without fraud 
or injustice; give us the peaceful and pure home 
both before and after it has been formed; give 
us, in short, the Ten Commandments well and 
fully lived up to, and you will give a brand of 
good citizenship that cannot be bettered by 
any "ism" ever invented or to be invented. 

There is another side to this matter of good 
citizenship that must not be neglected. We 
are not good citizens if, through indifference or 
fear or any other reason, we take no part in 
the proper government of our country. It is 



PATRIOTISM OF PEACE 231 

not patriotism to mourn and wring our hands 
over bad laws and let them stay on the statute 
books. It is not patriotism to be afraid of mak- 
ing a stir and some trouble, if that is necessary 
to improve existing conditions. When a great 
building is to go up into the air, the contractor 
does not hesitate about making the dirt fly or 
blasting the rocks. The fabric of State does 
not grow up by magic but by hard work in the 
face of opposition through earnest and per- 
sistent agitation. One of the most unprofitable 
occupations in this world is crying over spilt 
milk. Some people will sit down and mingle 
their tears with the white streams spilling from 
their milk pails in all directions, when there is a 
whole herd of cows waiting nearby with milk 
enough to run a dairy. 

"Good Catholic" and "good citizen" are 
synonymous and must be. Justice bids a good 
Catholic acknowledge by worship his God who 
has given him existence and governs him, and 
acknowledge by filial devotion his parents who 
have brought him into the world and provided 
for him, and acknowledge by patriotism his 
country which has given him civil existence 
and provided for his well-being. 



THE BREAKING POINT 



9 



THE BREAKING POINT 

IT was a New York ferry-boat. "Why," 
said a stranger to a young cleric, "why," 
and he was clearly angry, "should this wild 
impulse hurry me off? I am from the West 
and for the whole year am sober, industrious, 
regular. Then comes the fit again and I am 
off." A hard question that to answer, and 
would the answer turn the Westerner back 
from the far country, from the husks to his 
father's house? Not much else could be done, 
it is to be feared, except to breathe a prayer for 
Lochinvar as he disappeared into the riotous 
swirl of the great city. 

Scratch a Russian, it is said, and you will 
catch a Tartar. Well, for that matter, there 
are very few seasoned throughout. Veneers 
will vary in thickness, but scratch even an 
enameled personality long enough, and you 
will break through and get an explosion. One 

235 



236 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

of the most helpful products of experience is 
determining accurately just how far you can 
go, whether with another or with yourself. 
Nibble, nibble, but the time shall come when 
one more nibble is your last. Snap! and after 
you have extricated a mangled member from 
the jaws of the trap, the reminiscent soreness 
encourages a certain aloofness from further 
experiments. 

It is not always an individual which lays on 
the last straw. Sometimes even it may not be 
the weight of the straw but the weakness of 
the camel's back. A disaster or disgrace or dis- 
appointment or maybe a latent disease will 
exert the pressure which brings the break. Often 
it is the mere absence of anything; the same- 
ness, the drab color of life. Etiquette is a prison; 
family ways are chains ; friends are fetters. The 
trouble, it is true, is not really with all these. 
Once they were joys, and the caged lion was 
joyous among them. Instead of the load grow- 
ing heavier, it is a case of the bearer's back 
growing weaker. So a straw has become a 
tree trunk; a glance is a bullet; a look is a lash; 
a mote is a mountain. Even the garden of 
Eden will pall at times on the most eugenic 



THE BREAKING POINT 



237 



matrimony ever recorded, and unholy ten- 
dencies and surreptitious glances towards vari- 
ous forbidden attractions beyond the dead-line 
are likely to occur. America, called the "peer- 
less and paragon" by ardent orators, has a war 
every generation, a sort of national spree with 
twenty-five years of sobering up until the next 
race of hot-bloods grows impatient under 
routine and arrives at explosive conditions. 

It is far easier to diagnose the symptoms of 
this volcanic tendency than to prescribe rem- 
edies. What will keep the restless lad from 
the sea and the romantic maid from the street 
or the hot youth from war or the gloomy man 
from the nearest large city ? Oh, that we knew ! 
Caution, of course, is one need. The one who 
is subject to hay-fever will take to the waters 
of the sea during the danger period. Another 
with a different fever will move toward a dry 
state. Patience is even a greater need; pa- 
tience in the face of repeated failures. One 
diet of husks is not enough to convert all; at 
times the danger is that pride and despair 
may make one give up the way home and turn 
the prodigal into a tramp. Confidence, how- 
ever, is the greatest need of the human being 



238 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

who is carrying around a volcano within. To 
the tyrannous association of ideas that there 
will be an eruption, he will oppose the salutary 
and successful device of forgetting it. To 
close one's eyes to danger is no protection 
against danger except where the opening of the 
eyes is the very danger. Courage and con- 
fidence will make one hold out against the de- 
ceitful refurbishing of ever disappointing at- 
tractions, against the depressing and equally 
deceitful f eeling that resistance is vain and hope- 
less. To every "must" of passion and habit 
the courageous and confident resolution echoes 
back "can" and "will." 

Suppose it should happen that you are part 
of the environment which brings another to a 
break. What if you are the straw for the 
dromedary's back? Then your duty is clear. 
You are to keep your weight away. If he must 
be patient you must be more patient. If he is 
touchy, you must not take a perverse pleasure 
in irritating the raw spots. If he is gloomy, 
you must keep up the supply of sunshine by 
radiating more than your usual amount of 
splendor. When the many volumes of the 
History of Prodigals are finally completed, we 



THE BREAKING POINT 239 

believe that a full survey of that interesting 
class will establish beyond doubt that the elder 
brother and his different counterparts are re- 
sponsible for turning adrift more prodigals than 
any evil tendencies in the wanderers. The 
breaking point is due often to a flaw in the 
material but more often follows the pressure 
of an overload. Don't you know that a cold 
frost will make even weak, yielding water 
crack the toughest iron? 



FADS AND FADDISTS 



FADS AND FADDISTS 



HE word fad is used so much of late 



that probably very few have any idea 



how recent the word is. The earliest 
example given in the "New English Diction- 
ary" is dated 1834. There were fads before 
that date, and the word exists in dialects. Sud- 
denly fads became the fad, and a rare word 
became common. Fad has now gone the way 
of many an English word, and has raised a large 
family of connected words. What did people 
say a hundred years ago, when they spoke of 
fad? Perhaps they used the word hobby. 
Hobby, however, is limited. A hobby might 
be styled a personal fad. Many fads begin 
in hobbies, but they do not stop there. A 
crotchet expresses a like idea, but seems to be 
even more restricted than a hobby. Is not a 
crotchet an odd or peculiar hobby? Has it 
not something unusual about it? Fashion 




244 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

comes nearest to fad. Yet even here we feel 
conscious of a great difference. Fashion has 
not so long a life as a fad; it is based on a whim, 
concerns itself, as a rule, with things of lesser 
importance. A fad goes back to some truth, 
and considers itself all-important. Slang is a 
fashion in language; the exclusive or excessive 
use of Anglo-Saxon words in English is a fad. 
Fashion says "Everybody does it"; fad, 
" Everybody ought to do it." 

A fad, then, seems to be a theory applied too 
extensively, an overgrown or over-emphasized 
truth. It is one answer to all difficulties, the 
key to all locks, the panacea to all diseases. 
A faddist has no horizon; he has a vista. He 
looks at life, health, happiness and everything 
else in the universe through the brass cylinder 
of a telescope; he has a deeper, better view than 
every one else, but it is a partial view. He 
thinks that view should be everybody's view 
because it is so fully and perfectly his own view. 
He is like people who live in fewer dimensions 
than others and cannot lift themselves above 
their environment. A man with a fad lives in 
one dimension; he has position, but has not 
length, breadth or depth. 



FADS AND FADDISTS 245 

There is truth in a fad, but it is uncharitable 
truth. It will not speak to its neighbors or 
recognize them. If one facet of a diamond 
saw a reflection of its brightness, it would grow 
so conceited (you know how small a thing a 
facet is) that it would ignore all its fellows and 
think it was the only jewel in the world, re- 
flecting, too, the whole round glory of truth. 
Imagine a teapot exhibiting its tempest as the 
sole, copyrighted, patented article, while all 
others were spurious imitations. We should 
pity the teapot, but what else can the poor 
thing do? It is conscious of one only tempest, 
and that is gigantic enough for it. Therefore it 
wishes to make its truth the measure of all 
truth. The man with a fad has no general 
view. For him one truth is all truth. He has 
opened his eyes once; he has seen what he has 
seen, and now he has closed them forever and 
goes plunging towards the goal of destiny, 
bowling over all interference until he has 
planted the little truth tucked under his arm 
beyond the line and in the land where victory 
lies. 

The first famous faddist in history was 
iEneas, who exhorts us to apply to all the 



246 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

Greeks what he found true of Sinon. An in- 
duction from one example makes poor logic, 
but may make a respectable fad. Ah uno disce 
omnes should be the motto of the faddist. 
Father Hardouin, the learned Jesuit, was for a 
long time librarian, read so many manuscripts, 
and knew so much about copies, that he forgot 
that there was an original. Father Hardouin 
is responsible for the fad that among the 
glories of the thirteenth century is the com- 
position of all the writings of antiquity, with 
a few exceptions, which he was careful to 
point out. Professor Frederick Aug. Wolf 
was the originator or, at least, the propagator 
of a fad somewhat akin to Father Hardouin's. 
He is the one who made popular the higher- 
criticism fad, which last century had full con- 
trol of Homer and all other early literature. 
It has taken nearly a hundred years for the 
literary world to get over the excesses of that 
fad. In the realms of Scripture the fad is run- 
ning the same course as unconcernedly and as 
ludicrously as in Homer. It takes a long time 
for faddists to learn the limitations of the 
truth they possess. 

There must be some reason why the English 



FADS AND FADDISTS 247 

language became conscious about seventy-five 
years ago of the need of a new word, which it 
elevated from the provincialism of a dialect 
into national idiom. The reason is partly found 
in the prevailing traits of these last three 
quarters of a century. Science and journalism 
are characteristic of this portion of modern 
history, and they make the fruitful field wherein 
has grown our harvest of fads. Perhaps there 
have been periods in the world's history more 
fertile in theories than the one we speak of, 
but they were not periods of fads because the 
theories never grew beyond the dimensions of 
a hobby. The medieval alchemist rode his 
hobby around his bubbling crucible; the 
modern alchemist mounts his theory on the 
wings of journalism and it grows to the dimen- 
sions of a fad. 

For nearly a century we have been living in 
an age of discoveries. The true scientist, of 
course, will not stretch his facts beyond due 
dimensions. His enthusiastic followers have 
not always his saving common sense and sci- 
entific spirit. They in their enthusiasm, and 
faddists are always enthusiasts, must translate 
discoveries into solutions of the secret of the 



248 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

universe. Darwin was content to assert what 
he thought the fact of evolution; Spencer made 
evolution a fad and crushed the whole universe 
into his little formula. Darwin tried to prove 
by experimentation that some parts of the 
organic world were the product of evolution; 
Spencer by excogitation roundly asserted that 
everything was the product of evolution. 

Some years ago a book was translated from 
the French under the auspices of a professor 
of Columbia College. In it a French philos- 
opher developed the thought that imitation was 
the solution of the world's mystery. If both 
of these fads were true in their universal appli- 
cation, the world would have been brought to a 
standstill long ago. Evolution demands un- 
ceasing change; imitation demands ceaseless 
reproduction of the same. There is no evolu- 
tion without a difference; there is no difference 
with imitation. The whole truth is in neither 
system; both systems have a little truth, but 
their authors were not content with that fact; 
they desired their truth to be the only truth, 
and they succeeded in producing fads. But 
theorizing and journalism were the order of 
the day these last seventy years or more. It 



FADS AND FADDISTS 249 

is more convenient to buy your thinking al- 
ready done than to do it yourself, and it was 
a poor journal that did not furnish its readers 
with a brand-new theory of the universe every 
morning at a very low rate. 



HOW FADS GROW 



I 



HOW FADS GROW 



ADS grow from mental pride. It is 



fatal to self-love to admit that one's 



knowledge is limited; it is disastrous to 
confess that, in the language of the advertiser, 
any other mind has a commodity just as good. 
It requires mental humility to do that. Again, 
as one must have some answer, mental sloth 
helps fads to grow because it saves thinking 
to make one answer do for all difficulties. To 
be modest is to be ignorant; to be humble is 
to be incompetent. We want instantaneous, 
complete and lasting cures in all our patent 
medicines; we expect no less from our patent 
theories. Indeed, the patent medicine is a 
very apt comparison. Most patent medicines 
begin in fads and end in frauds 

Darwinism, Atomism, Eclecticism, Burbank- 
ism are all so many titles of likely subjects for 
fads. If a gardener can develop by careful 




254 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

selection and by the burning of heaps of waste 
products, say a pea-melon, with all the deli- 
ciousness of melons and all the nutritiousness 
of peas, why, ask the faddists, should we not 
have men and women with the brains of 
Aristotle and the muscles of Milo, the Cro- 
tonian, and the morals of St. Louis and the 
manners of Chesterfield? The only answer 
occurring to common sense is that men and 
women are not vegetables, and rebel in their 
stubborn free- wills against careful selection and 
have very decided objections to being treated 
as waste products. The faddist, however, can- 
not see free-will and immortal souls through 
his half -opened eyes. He sees only Burbankism. 

To have and grow a really successful fad, 
you must be careful in the choice of your sub- 
ject. Spencerianism and Eclecticism and other 
such systems will do for the educated, but for a 
world-wide fad, you must take a subject upon 
which all can judge; you must select one of the 
great needs of man; you must choose the health 
of the body, the improvement of the mind, 
the good of the soul. Food and drink, educa- 
tion, religion are the best subjects for a fad. 
The very mention of their names suggests a 



HOW FADS GROW 255 

host of fads which have held the field suc- 
cessively, all promising to cure the ills that 
flesh and mind and soul are heir to. 

There was once a good tailor in a religious 
community who had an invariable statement 
for all who came to supply themselves with 
head-gear or other apparel. Trying on hat or 
coat upon himself, he would say: "It fits me; 
it fits you." In most of our food-fads there 
lurks the same fallacy. They all have some 
good, but they have not all good. The tailor's 
hats and coats served as coverings, but were 
not always snug ones. How many educational 
misfits too are being thrown hastily on the 
intellectual nakedness of our youth! It was 
Grant Allen who wanted to put our univer- 
sities on wheels and educate their inhabitants 
by travel, because he had, so he said, got more 
good out of seeing Rome than by reading Latin. 
It was easy to discover the fallacy in his fad 
and nip it in the bud. Without his Latin 
Rome was a closed book. Another enthusiast 
has related that Asa Gray, while riding in a 
car, had his attention attracted by a tree, and 
so began his famous botanical career. If 
memory does not play false, this fact was to 



256 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

serve as the opening chapter in an educational 
fad. Examples, incidents, anecdotes, related 
without reference to the times and circum- 
stances in which they took place, have given 
rise to systems and fads with the fatal disease 
of half-truth. 

The most successful fad of modern times 
and perhaps of all times is Christian Science. 
Mrs. Eddy related herself the facts upon which 
it was based. Her story was that she cured 
some people by bread pills. In their case, 
thinking did the curing, but as thinking cannot 
really do any curing, there must be nothing 
to cure. She had a promising subject. Every- 
body is, was, or will be sick; everybody wants 
health. It was consoling to know that disease 
succumbed to bread pills, for which it was 
more scientific and hygienic to substitute set- 
tled convictions. Mrs. Eddy then improved 
her fad by making it a religion, and as she 
made so strong an appeal to the power of 
mind, she flattered the intellectual attainments 
of her disciples. She thus contrived to build 
her fad on the three strongest foundations that 
could be found — health of body, education of 
mind, and religious relief of soul. Yet she had 



HOW FADS GROW 257 

something better still, and that was the name 
of her fad. Take a new system of philosophy 
now clamoring for recognition. It has a fairly 
good principle to begin with; its grain of truth 
is capable of rolling up around it a great deal 
of falsehood. It is the snowball inside the 
snow-man. But what of the name? America 
worships success. Success has been the stand- 
ard of business, politics, war and even of 
morality. Pragmatism makes success the 
standard of truth. That is true which succeeds. 
A very promising principle! But look at the 
name. Any one would be glad to answer to the 
name, Christian Scientist. Call a man Prag- 
matist or Eddyist, and he would think he had 
a new disease. 



HOW FADS GO 



HOW FADS GO 



HE antithesis and the antidote of fad- 



dism is common sense. A faddist is 



such because his little system has worn 
out a groove for him; it has eliminated the 
grade-crossings and never gives its passenger 
a glimpse of other truths. "If the truth could 
become a fad, it would be accepted by the 
Smart Set, but truth is something too large for 
that," says William Dean Howells. To cure 
a fad, you must have the truth, the whole 
truth, and nolhing but the truth. A man with 
a liberal education, in the old sense of the 
term, could not be a faddist. It is significant 
that electivism and faddism are contempo- 
raries. For a full-fledged electivist, anything 
can give an education. The high-priest of 
electivism some years ago argued that sawing 
and planing and hammering would give a 




262 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

liberal education. Now, not only the man 
who makes the book shelf has culture, but five 
feet of reading will do the work if a man has 
no time to do his own hammering. Electivism 
has stretched its little inheritance of truth to 
the point of breaking when it elected its short- 
shelf university course. The electivist was 
bound, unless he had inherited common sense, 
to become a faddist. At any rate, there was 
nothing in his education to cure him of it. 
Take, however, the man with a liberal educa- 
tion, an education that appeals to faculties 
rather than facts. He is persistently discour- 
aged from tying himself down to any particular 
science or art. His mind is trained to see truth 
at any angle, and welcome it at every angle. 
He may not be very deep in any branch. He 
does not claim to be. His claim is rather that 
he can be deep wherever truth is, and he 
touches truth at so many points of the com- 
pass that he will not become profoundly im- 
mersed in it at N. N. W., and forget, as a fad- 
dist does, that the horizon is a circle with an 
indefinite number of points. 

Fads go with time, but time is not a very 
speedy cure. It has taken nearly a century 



HOW FADS GO 263 

for Homer to get over Wolfism, and the news 
of the recovery has not yet reached everybody » 
Time had to choose a new president to one of 
our great universities before electivism began 
to shrink back to its proper dimensions. The 
new president argued that electivism could 
not carry a foot-ball team through half a 
season. The coach prescribes the courses, and 
sees to it that they are faithfully followed by 
his students. A metaphor from athletics dealt 
electivism the severest blow it has perhaps ever 
received. 

The study of philosophy, which, before the 
age of electivism, always completed the course 
of a liberal education, is the most fundamental 
and thorough cure of fads and a tendency to 
fads. Moderns have accused the Scholastic 
philosophers of pushing their principles to con- 
clusions with a blissful ignoring of facts. The 
Scholastic philosophers might retort that 
moderns have pushed facts into theories and 
systems with a blissful ignoring of principles. 
Common sense is the antithesis of faddism and 
Scholastic philosophy is admitted to be, even 
by its critics, the philosophy of common sense. 
Modernism, the latest theological fad, has a 



264 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

grievance against Scholastic philosophy. Mod- 
ernists say Scholasticism is over-given to intel- 
lectualism; they are afraid to call it common 
sense. Tertullian said once that pagans were 
born Christians. Modernists began with that 
truth, closing their eyes to its limitations. 
Upon looking into the born soul and not find- 
ing it equipped with the "Summa" of St. 
Thomas, they concluded, not that their fad was 
deficient, but that these conclusions were the 
outcome of intellectual formalism, which 
seemed to them something uninviting and un- 
bearable. Their own souls were equipped with 
emotional informalism. To feel and not to 
reason was the way to truth. This is giving 
only one phase of Modernism, but it was a fad 
(we can now speak in the past tense) and reso- 
lutely propagated one phase of truth. 

True philosophy seeks all truth, and seeks 
it at its fountain-head, where the stream runs 
clearest. It knows that God and religion and 
life and the human soul and the human body, 
too, are things which wholly refuse to be solved 
by one theory, or to be set forth in a mathe- 
matical formula. Scholastic philosophy may 
be made narrow or suffer misinterpretation, or 



HOW FADS GO 



265 



sadden and confuse by insisting too much on 
the differences among its adherents, or it may 
run shallow by spreading too wide — but all 
that is against its professions and its prime 
purposes. In reading the language of facts in 
order to arrive at the understanding of prin- 
ciples, it will not pass over pages or skip lines 
or ignore words or even punctuation. The 
complete sense is arrived at by keeping in view 
all the elements of language. The knowledge 
of first causes is the profession of Scholastic 
philosophy; that is the sense it reads in the 
language of facts. Hence it is broad in its 
professions, whatever may be said of some of 
its professors. Give a student once in his life 
an outlook from the high level of philosophy; 
let him behold the boundaries of thoughts; let 
him learn the position of himself and his con- 
clusions with reference to other people and 
other things. In mapping out thus the uni- 
verse, he will recognize that his ideas are not 
conterminous with creation, and will see that 
it is metaphysical quackery to profess to solve 
all secrets by one formula. It savors of the 
fairy story to open all doors by one magic word. 
The man educated in the philosophy of the 



266 CHAFF AND WHEAT 

scholastics, who has been put through a course 
of systematized common sense, will never dwell 
in the land of fairies or of fads where it is pre- 
tended that all truth can be put in a nutshell. 
An age of facts without philosophy will in- 
evitably be fertile in fads. 



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